being influenced by other painters, which he felt could paralyse artists, perhaps for an entire generation, he could not wholly escape Courbet’s influence in the 1860s and 1870s. Matisse commented on this: ‘CŽzanne did not have to fear Poussin’s influence because he was certain not to take on Poussin’s forms, but when Courbet got through to him, as he did to most painters at that time, CŽzanne’s technique reflected Courbet’s too strongly, and CŽzanne’s expression was limited by it.’
	CŽzanne also loved tenebrism, which he found echoed in the works of JosŽ de Ribera and Francisco de Zurbar‡n. His first works were sombre and represented violent events such as murders, rapes, abductions and orgies, which contrasted strongly with the pastoral scenes inspired by his romantic vision of the world. These gloomy works were an outlet for his dreams and fantasies, an illustration of a world of unsatisfied passions that fed on literature. CŽzanne knew Baudelaire’s poem ‘Une charogne’ (‘Carrion’) by heart, and he enjoyed depicting the sudden brutality that could arise between the delights of love and the horrors of death. Working in thick paint and using his palette knife to define shapes, he moulded his subjects with the flat of the blade and applied slabs of colour to indicate light. This rich, supple language was drawn from Courbet’s