Man Smoking a Pipe

While creating a balanced composition founded on a Renaissance painting attributed to Raphael, C�zanne paints the human being as an object, refusing to soften his manner or to be diverted by psychological details. For him, nature, objects, and people compose a single material world, reproducible through paint. This unity is underlined by one of his own still-lifes, which serves as the background of the portrait.

The model for this painting is believed to have been the gardener Alexander Polin.