Just as Rubens's paintings, and especially the magnificent series on the life of Maria de' Medici, were Cézanne's favorites in the Louvre, so the Apotheosis of Henry IV was by far his favorite among the twenty-one pictures in the series. He was already drawing after it early in his career (Chappuis, Adrien. The Drawings of Paul Cézanne. 2 vols. Greenwich, Conn., 1973, no. 102), and at the end he still kept a photograph of it in his studio. What is remarkable is that all of the subsequent copies--the present one and nine others (ibid., nos. 489-90, 598, 627, 1138-40, 1215)--isolate from this huge composition a single figure, that of Bellona, or War, lamenting the loss of Henry IV as a great general. It is indeed one of the most conspicuous figures, prominently placed and largely nude, but it must have appealed to Cézanne as "an expression of extreme pathos, the body twisting in conflict, both arms bent behind the head, the drapery swirling about the legs" (Reff, Theodore. "New Sources for Cézanne's Copies." The Art Bulletin, vol. 42. June 1960, p. 145). Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 212.