Trophy of Tenacity

To say the least, it was one of the biggest Cezannes in the world -- 61 ft. by 4 ft. of dark, thickly impasted paint.

Paul Cezanne made his Portrait of the Artist's Father in 1866, when he was 27. For years it hung in the privacy of a mansion on the outskirts of Paris owned by the family of the French industrialist Auguste Pellerin, who was an assiduous collector of Cezannes. Some ten years ago Paul Mellon, son and heir of Andrew Mellon, saw it there and with the tenacity of true love, set out to buy it. An intricate mating dance of negotiations began in 1965 and culminated at a Washington press conference last week, when Mellon announced the gift of the Cezanne to the National Gallery his father had so lavishly endowed. Mellon, a shy man, posed uncomfortably for photographers beside the painting. "I like it better at the races," Mellon observed. "There you have a horse to pat."

The price Mellon paid was not officially disclosed, but it was no secret that it was the highest ever for a French painting. Reliable sources put it at $1,600,000 -$50,000 more than Norton Simon paid for Renoir's Le Pont des Arts in 1968. It reflected--and will encourage --the hugely inflated prices collectors seem willing to pay for Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting.

Mellon himself explained his purchase with disarming candor: "I thought it was a very great picture--one that belongs in the gallery because of its size and scale and because I like it personally." But J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery's director, went into raptures. "It's a powerhouse. For sheer scale, intensity and impact, I would put this painting up against anything in our collections."

That sounded like excitable rhetoric, but in fact Brown's words were hedged. "Impact" has never been a criterion of quality in art and if scale was one, all billboards might be masterpieces. The fact that the Cezanne, next to Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Bend (which cost about $5,000,000) is the costliest new picture in Washington does not mean it can be "put up against" Bellini's Feast of the Gods, Raphael's Alba Madonna, or even the museum's other and better Cezannes. Its interest is mainly historical. Cezannes of this date are rare. Even the ineptitudes of this gawkily powerful portrait--such as the clumsy handling of the trousers and the armchair--have a certain interest in the context of Cezanne's development, reminding viewers that genius has to grow and is not born full-blown.

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