Interior with Two Women and a Child

Paul Cézanne completed this Interior with Two Women and a Child in 1861, making it the earliest of his works in any Russian collection. The canvas shows the artist's mother and sisters, Marie on the left and the small figure of Rose in the middle, standing by an aquarium. Despite the everyday subject, the painting possesses a quality that sets it apart from typical genre work.

Cézanne was just 22 when he created this painting, working in a style influenced by Romanticism before developing the Post-Impressionist approach that would later define his legacy. The color structure emphasizes local colors with minimal chromatic transitions, and the dense paint texture gives the composition a static, almost timeless quality. Art historians have noted numerous references to Old Masters in the work.

The painting demonstrates Cézanne's early interest in domestic subjects and family members, though he would later become famous for his landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire and his radical still lifes. Today, the work resides at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. It arrived there in 1948 after passing through the collection of Ivan Morozov and the State Museum of New Western Art, representing Cézanne's first steps as a painter.