An early still life by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne on view at the Yale University Art Gallery is small — slightly larger than a sheet of printer paper. But it merits a close look, says Yale College student Sabrina Soriano.
The painting, dated between 1867 and 1869, depicts a wine bottle grouped with a glass partially filled with red wine, a peppermill, two lemons, and a slender green vegetable, which Soriano says is probably a chive.
Soriano, a gallery guide at the museum, shares more insights on the canvas in a recording that serves as an audio guide to museum visitors: Her clear, concise descriptions of Cézanne’s composition suggest a scholar in command of her subject.
The painting’s modest size, she informs visitors in the recording, draws in the viewer, “encouraging an almost contemplative sort of looking.”
“At first glance, the composition’s darkness is quite striking,” she explains. “The upper half recedes into a velvety black, while the lower plane settles into muted greys. Against this restrained backdrop, certain objects catch the light with quiet insistence.”
“Still Life with Bottle, Glass, and Lemons” by Paul Cézanne
She turns to the lemons. “Their surfaces are rendered with subtle, attenuated strokes — gentler than the vigorous mark-making we often associate with Cézanne,” she says. “Their soft yellows contrast with the cool ground beneath them.”
Behind the lemons, the wine glass “gleams with a crisp reflection — one of the brightest points in the painting, anchoring our gaze,” Soriano says. “The glass holds only a small amount of wine — just enough to catch the light, but not enough to toast with.”
She ends the audio guide entry with questions.
“Is this the promise of a meal?” she asks. “It’s remnants? Or simply Cézanne’s version of ‘I just grabbed whatever was on my counter’ — a feeling we all know well.”
As a Yale student, Soriano has indeed become an authority on Cézanne. Last fall, she was the sole undergraduate to attend “Odyssée Cézanne,” an invitation-only international symposium of Cézanne scholars held in Aix-en-Provence, France, the 19th-century post-Impressionist artist’s hometown.
Soriano’s journey to France began three years ago when she was a student in the honors transfer program at Citrus College, a community college in Glendora, California. A year later, she was admitted to Yale along with several other prestigious schools. Having a chance to work at the Gallery, she said, set Yale apart.
“As someone who loves visual art, but especially the Impressionists, the prospect of having works by Van Gogh, Monet, and Cézanne a 10-minute walk from my door was exciting,” she said. “I knew it’d be a place I’d return to a lot.”
One challenge of being a transfer student is figuring out where you fit in. At the Gallery, I instantly felt a sense of community.
Soriano in a Halloween costume she made based on “Ocean Park #24” by Richard Diebenkorn, one of her favorite artists.
Sharing joy
Since Soriano arrived at Yale in the fall of 2024, the Art Gallery has become a second home to her — and a source of friends, mentors, and inspiration.
Early in her first semester, she applied to the museum’s Gallery Guide Program, which provides Yale undergraduates a paid opportunity to develop and lead interactive “close-looking” tours of the museum for the public. The experience gave Soriano a chance to bond with her new peers.
“One challenge of being a transfer student is figuring out where you fit in,” she said. “At the Gallery, I instantly felt a sense of community.”
First-year gallery guides undergo rigorous training, meeting with museum staff twice a week in the fall and spring semesters to study the collections, learn audience engagement skills, and develop their tours.
Soriano treated the program like an academic course. The first-year guides research, write, and shape their hour-long tours based on a theme of their choosing and highlights objects across the collections. They must be prepared to lead and navigate conversations with visitors about the objects in their tours.
At the end of the year, they offer their tours to a group of museum staff and veteran gallery guides, who when provide substantive feedback before the students begin offering tours to visitors.
During Soriano’s first “evaluation” tour, one of the participants was Liliana Milkova, the Nolen Curator of Education and Academic Affairs at the Gallery. Milkova had not met Soriano prior to the tour, which is themed on the concept of introspection.
“I was captivated by Sabrina’s ability to engage us in deep looking and weave an evocative, powerful story about the objects in her tour,” said Milkova, who has since become one of Soriano’s closest mentors. “She succeeded not only in helping us to consider how the objects visually address the theme of introspection, but also in encouraging us to turn inward and reflect on who we are and how we engage with visual art.”
Soriano possesses a natural warmth that helps her connect with visitors to the museum, says Liliana Milkova, who leads the Gallery’s Education Department.
Lucy Haskell, the Gallery’s manager of student engagement, said that Soriano has a calming tone that welcomes questions from visitors.
“Sabrina is very calm, reflective, and attentive to what people have to say, which is in keeping with the theme of introspection,” said Haskell, who directs the Gallery Guide program. “She achieves an atmosphere of stillness that encourages people to be patient with the process of close looking.”
Soriano solicits feedback about her tours and takes notes seriously, Haskell said.
“After a tour, she’ll always ask what she could have done better,” she said. “But one thing that always stands out is that she takes a genuine joy in this work. And she shares that joy with the people who visit the museum.”
In addition to serving as a gallery guide, Soriano has worked in the Gallery’s Department of European Art. In that role, she has conducted provenance research and created audio tours for two works by Cézanne: the still life and “The House of Dr. Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise,” a landscape in which a winding road curves past the residence of Dr. Paul Gachet, Cézanne’s friend and patron. (Gachet once owned the still life on view.)
“I really enjoy providing visitors with ‘bite-sized’ nuggets of information from my research on objects,” she said. “The point is to not overwhelm people with information, but offer them just enough to support their own deeper engagement with the works.”
Working at the Gallery piqued Soriano’s interest in the museum profession and sparked a desire to study art history and share her knowledge with others.
“How can I apply my knowledge to the world and to making it a better place?” she said. “And how can I learn from others?”
Cézanne’s “The House of Dr. Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise.”
‘The best place’
Last summer, Soriano completed a prestigious curatorial internship at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (just a couple of hours from her hometown of Azusa, California).
At the time, she had declared a major in statistics and data science, but was strongly considering adding a second major in the history of art. She hoped the experience at the Getty would help her to decide whether to pursue a career a curator and scholar of art history.
While there, she wrote label text for a few paintings, helped rehang a wall installation in the museum’s Impressionist Gallery, and gave tours in English and Spanish of a temporary exhibition on Artemisia Gentileschi, a prominent 17th-century Italian Baroque artist.
During the summer, a painting by Cézanne, “Farmhouse and Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan,” arrived at the Getty from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for treatment under a conservation agreement between the two institutions. Cézanne had painted the canvas at Jas de Bouffan, the Cezanne family estate in Aix-en-Provence, where the artist lived and worked for several decades.
After she expressed an interest in the conservation process, Soriano was encouraged by the conservator, Laura Rivers, to observe the treatment. A friendship developed and Rivers mentioned to Soriano that a symposium of Cézanne scholars was happening in Aix-en-Provence that September. She suggested that Soriano attend it and reached out to the symposium’s organizers on the intern’s behalf. The organizers extended her an invitation.
The MacMillan Center for International and Areas Studies at Yale helped Soriano pay for the trip France. She arrived in Aix-en-Provence arrived on Sept. 24, joining an intimate gathering of art historians, curators, and conservators.
“They were so surprised to see a student there,” she said.
After that initial surprise, she says, the group embraced her. The opening event was held at the Musée Granet, which had organized an exhibition of Cézanne’s works from repositories across the globe. During the event, a fellow attendee asked Soriano what she hoped to gain from the experience. “I told him that this was my opportunity to learn about Cézanne,” she said. “I wanted to locate gaps in Cézanne scholarship and how I might contribute. He was very kind and said, ‘Then this is the best place for you to be.’”
Over the next three days, she attended a series of talks and lectures and forged connections with leading experts on Cézanne. For example, Jayne Warman, an art historian who co-directed and authored the comprehensive Catalogue Raisonné of Cézanne’s works, gave her a personal tour of the exhibition at the Musée Granet and introduced her to other scholars present.
“If anything, the symposium solidified my desire to study Cézanne,” Soriano said.
‘Pure interest’
Ask Soriano to name her favorite artists and she’ll reel off a list that includes Paul Gauguin, Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbaran, and American abstract impressionist Richard Diebenkorn.
“I like a lot of art,” she said.
As for Cézanne, she likes his use of color and negative space.
“Some people say he left paintings unfinished, but I think his use of negative space captures how we recall memories,” she said. “Some aspects seem faint while others are vivid. We fill in the gaps with our imaginations.”
She appreciates that while 19th-century critics often panned Cézanne’s work — one review, she noted, argued that a canvas of his looked like it was painted with a pistol instead of a brush — artists within the Impressionist circle deeply admired him.
“Renoir said that Cézanne couldn’t complete two brushstrokes without the painting already being great,” she said. “Gauguin would brag about his friend Cézanne. He probably carried one of his still lives into cafes with him.”
While in France, she learned that she had received a Creative and Performing Arts Award from the Yale Council of the Heads of College, which funds student projects in every residential college, to support an article she was planning to write about Cézanne at Yale. (“My goal is just to get more students at Timothy Dwight College to visit the Gallery,” she said.)
Soriano understands how intellectual work can serve others, Haskell said. “She’s able to translate complex ideas into easily digestible language,” she said. “That ability demonstrates her depth of thought.”
She also has a natural warmth, Milkova says, which enables Soriano to connect with people, whether they be world-class scholars or everyday folks wandering into a museum. “That’s a gift, not something you can learn, at least not easily,” she said. “It goes back to her deep-seated interest in art history and an energy and enthusiasm that come from that pure interest, rather than ambition.”
This semester Soriano has again placed herself into a position where she can engage with seasoned scholars: As a Krasis Scholar at Oxford, she has studied principles of moral theology and Medieval theology in a graduate program at Blackfriars Hall, a small Catholic academic institution within the university run by Dominican Order.
“It’s lots of Augustine, lots of Aquinas,” said Soriano, who values her Roman Catholic faith. “But it’s not history. It’s not learning what Aquinas thought, it’s learning to think like him. And learning to argue against him.”
The theological training will support her senior thesis, which focuses on sacred imagery in late-19th and early-20th century French Art, including Cézanne and Gauguin — artists who are not widely considered to be religious painters, but whose work is imbued with religious imagery.
“Their personal lives are very much rooted in religion,” she said. “Cézanne was a devout Catholic who attended Mass daily. How did this shape his work and the work of his followers?”
Soriano, who will graduate in December, says that the downside to being a transfer student is having fewer semesters in which to take advantage of the opportunities a Yale education can provide. But she’s tried to make the most of her time here.
“I feel very grateful to be at Yale,” she said. “Communities like the Gallery have made the experience very special and provided me with wonderful opportunities, and I wish I had more time here, but I’m determined to make the most of the time I have.”
