And the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who put Cézanne’s career on the map (he organized his first portrait show), is rewarded, if that’s the word, with the likeness seen here. Vollard claimed to have submitted to 115 sittings for the painting, each lasting from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., during which time he was verbally slapped — “You wretch! You’ve spoiled the pose! Do I have to tell you again you must sit like an apple?” — if he so much as twitched.

The torment he suffered doesn’t come through in the image itself, in which Vollard projects the calm of a seasoned statesman. Yet Cézanne, after all the hassle, decided the picture was a failure and refused to finish it. One day he put down his brushes and never came back.