Between April 1879 and March 1880 C┼╜zanne lived in Melun, where, inspired by the poplars and rivers, he worked on the hills at M┼╜e. The combination of trees and water is a recurring theme in his work, in both the pure landscapes and the bathing scenes. Although he painted the large stretch of water of the Bay of Marseilles at LΓÇÖEstaque, he also liked the running water of streams and rivers and the smooth surface of lakes.
No human is present in this landscape, which was painted on the banks of the River Almont in the little village of Maincy, to the east of Melun, towards the end of spring or at the beginning of summer in 1879. The composition avoids all anecdotal or sentimental details, and in this it differs from CorotΓÇÖs landscapes, which show washerwomen or peasant women by the waterΓÇÖs edge. C┼╜zanneΓÇÖs landscape does not pretend to be anything other than what it is: a tangle of geometric shapes formed by the tree trunks and branches and by the bridge, which stands out from the colourful but formless background of the foliage and water. A wooden footbridge linking two stone arches runs across the centre of the composition. The painting is entirely built up of slanting squarish or oblong brush strokes, which hold the painting together and give an impression of strength and solidity. C┼╜zanne began to experiment with this mosaic-like method of working at Melun, and it marks the beginning of a new style of painting that went against the ImpressionistsΓÇÖ practice of breaking up forms in space. Although the subject is reduced to simple geometric shapes, the colour is very complex. The paint is applied in superimposed brush strokes that reveal the ochre underpainting to simulate the light through the trees. Above a building, which is probably a mill, a little piece of sky is visible in the top left corner, the only opening in this otherwise dense and opaque landscape.
Bathers (sketch)
He wanted to portray the bathers in situ, in a landscape; he did not want to create paintings in a studio. This paradox caused him countless problems, and towards the end of his life he tried to explain them to ƒmile Bernard. ‘You know that I often made sketches of male and female bathers, which I would have liked to have painted, on a large scale, from life. Lack of a model forced me to be content with glimpses. There were other obstacles to overcome, such as finding somewhere to set the scene that would not be too different from the one I had imagined, of gathering together several people, of finding men and women who did not mind undressing and holding the poses I wanted. There were a thousand other difficulties, too, such as carrying around such a large canvas, the vagaries of the weather, the positioning of the canvas, the materials that would be needed to work on it. I was, therefore, forced to abandon my plan, which had been to revise Poussin from nature, rather than build up the composition from notes, drawings and fragmented sketches. I meant to create a real Poussin – from nature, working in the open air, with colour and light – not one of those works that are entirely conceived in the studio and that have that brown tone that indicates there was no daylight, no reflections from the sky.’
Portrait of the Painter, Achille Emperaire
C┼╜zanne met the Aix-born painter Achille Emperaire (1829ΓÇô98) not in the south of France but at the Atelier Suisse, where they were both working on life studies. A penniless artist with an ungainly physique, Emperaire was helped by his fellow southerner on more than one occasion, and by painting this monumental portrait of him, C┼╜zanne transformed the poor outcast into an heroic figure, in much the same way that VelazquezΓÇÖs paintings of dwarfs had done. The painting was refused by the selection committee of the Salon in 1870. At once naΓÇóve, ingenuous and theatrical, the work is a celebration of the character of the subject and of his pathetic fate.
It was justly described by a mutual friend, Joachim Gasquet: ‘A dwarf, but with a magnificent head, like one of van Dyck’s cavaliers, with a fiery soul and nerves of steel. With an iron pride within a deformed body, the flame of genius burns in a misshapen hearth, like a combination of Don Quixote and Prometheus. … He [CŽzanne] has painted an astonishing portrait of Emperaire, with the dwarf’s heavy head standing out from red flowers of the upholstery, the legs, too short to reach the ground, resting on a foot warmer. Wrapped in his robe, the slender figure has just come out of the bath. Emaciated, like a caricature, exasperated and overwhelmed with the effort of living, pathetic, the long hands dangling, his beautiful, pain-worn face appears to be attached to the armature of a tragic will; and above him, like an ironic label, CŽzanne has inscribed in large letters the name “Achille Emperaire”.’
The Temptation of St Anthony
CŽzanne completed three paintings on the theme of the temptation of St Anthony. This version is CŽzanne’s last known working of a subject that had often been represented since the time of Hieronymous Bosch and also described by many nineteenth-century writers. During a period when most of CŽzanne’s works dealt with erotic subjects and murders, this conventional scene appears to be a representation of the mastering of the sexual conflicts that beset the painter at this time. The temptress, who is placed in the centre of the picture, unveils herself with a triumphant gesture, but she is standing some distance from the hermit, unlike another version of the scene, in which she assails him relentlessly. The devil, who appears on the left of the composition, seems to be playing a dual role: he is inciting the temptress as well as, paradoxically, appearing to be the protector to whom the saint clings. A circle of cherubs gives the work the lightness of spirit of an eighteenth-century scne galante. In this painting, the woman, an object of both adoration and fear, does not seem to be the absolute corrupter of the earlier versions. She has something of a classical goddess about her as well as prefiguring a bather. The heavy shapes of her swaying body are placed in full light, and the white drapery that surrounds her, like a mandorla or like the shell of the Venus Anadyomene, forms a strong contrast with, or even a total separation from, the group formed by the entwined devil and saint. At the time he painted this work, CŽzanne had just met Hortense Fiquet, and she may have been the model for this buxom nude. Apart from the unhappy liaison that led to his marriage in 1886 and a short sentimental affair in 1885, we do not know if CŽzanne had any romantic relationships. In his youth he had idealized romantic, pure love, but by 1885 he had become disillusioned, as he revealed in a letter to Zola in August 1885: ‘The brothel in town, or somewhere else, but nothing else. I pay for it. The word is dirty, but I need peace and that is the price I must pay.’
The blue vase
Renoir recounted that C┼╜zanne used paper flowers for his paintings. C┼╜zanne began to paint bunches of flowers about 1870, when he made contact with the Impressionists. His first compositions with flowers are of single vases, but in the following decade he mixes flowers with fruit, and later still they become the only subject matter, filling the whole canvas. Although he did not collect the works of his contemporaries, towards the end of his life C┼╜zanne bought from Vollard a superb watercolour by Delacroix of a bouquet of flowers, of which he painted a copy. The exuberance of these flowers is at one with the baroque style of his last works. Even more than his landscapes or scenes with bathers, C┼╜zanneΓÇÖs later still lifes with flowers and fruits celebrate a joy achieved through the successful balancing of sensual, spiritual and intellectual qualities. Unlike most of his work, which was for so long decried, these compositions enjoyed early success. Huysmans, who did not like C┼╜zanne, made an exception with these still lifes. In 1907, when the first retrospective exhibition was organized by the Salon dΓÇÖAutomne, one critic ventured to praise them: ΓÇÿHis craftsmanship shows itself mainly in his still lifes, and the sight of them awakens in us a feeling that we can actually touch them ΓÇô the fruits on a plate, the beautiful bright red, green and yellow apples, the sour grapes, the pink onions, a plate, a porcelain fruit bowl, a salt-glazed pot, a black marble clock ΓÇô these things are real and continue to exist.ΓÇÖ Paradoxically, the strength of these works derives from their complete lack of artifice and from C┼╜zanneΓÇÖs depiction of the fundamental meaning of the objects, fruit and flowers. He once said: ΓÇÿI want to astonish Paris with an apple.ΓÇÖ He invested in these works, especially in the fruit, all his virtuosity and all his love, finding in them a universal significance.
THE BARRISTER OR UNCLE DOMINIQUE
The young C┼╜zanne used his relations as his first models: his sisters, his father, and his maternal uncle Dominique Aubert who obliged the young artist's whims by dressing up as a monk, or wearing a turban or a cotton cap with bobbles. He was no barrister, but here he is wearing with the utmost seriousness, the barrister's robe and parodying the advocate's gestures. The face and hands, which are the most expressive elements of the portrait, are worked out in thick impasto smoothed out with a palette knife. The essentially black and white manner of this work -a creamy white and a deep black verging on blue- are reminiscent of the contrasted palette of Manet's Spanish period.
Still life with basket
The objects are no longer isolated: it is as if they are engaged in a warm, lively dialogue, which reflects the care and attention C┼╜zanne has lavished on them. He explained this to Joachim Gasquet: ΓÇÿThose glasses and plates are talking to each other. Endlessly exchanging secrets.ΓÇÖ
CŽzanne insisted that this exchange was vital and that there must be a palpable attraction between inanimate objects, which is normally denied to them. He lent them his own sensibility when he said: ‘Objects penetrate each other. … They do not stop living. … They spread imperceptibly around each other, through intimate reflections, as we do through glances and words.’ He chose simple, everyday objects for his still lifes, and they reappear in picture after picture: the white ceramic fruit dish, the squat round sugar bowl, the Marseilles pottery, the ginger jar with its wicker holder, the bottle of rum surrounded by straw and the jug with the floral pattern. For backgrounds he used three different fabrics, sometimes singly, sometimes together: one blue with a deep ultramarine floral pattern, another with a pattern of blue and ochre leaves, and a third fabric, a thick woollen cloth or rug, with a brown, red and green check. This preference for simple subjects is seen again in his selection of fruits, which he chose as much for their solidity as for their shape and colour.
Rocks by the caves above Ch‰teau noir
After his mother’s death in 1897, the Jas de Bouffan was sold, and CŽzanne worked at several new sites, including the Ch‰teau Noir and the quarry at BibŽmus. These landscapes of forests and rocks were framed to give the impression that the subjects so completely filled the canvas that all the elements were fused together in the painted area. Patches of colour were built up methodically to create the image. The panoramic views of Mont Sainte-Victoire are kaleidoscopes of colour, in which the outlines appear and disappear in the shimmering light and air. The pyramidal shape of the mountain rises from the coloured magma as CŽzanne creates the impression of the elements before they formed the landscape visible today. He concentrated on organizing the subject matter on the canvas through a technique that did not depend on a descriptive vision but that was not, at the same time, non-referential. Although he broke down the subject into coloured planes, he did not ignore the third dimension – volume – and, as he explained in a letter to Bernard, he established a system of colour equivalence that allowed him to translate visual sensations into gradations of colour. Returning constantly to the same subjects, he was able to scrutinize them over a long period. When he was an old man he said to Vollard: ‘The outline escapes me.’
In addition to oil paintings, he produced many watercolours, a medium he used with great skill. He would lay areas of translucent colour on a preliminary drawing, but instead of covering the entire paper, he left spaces between the coloured areas, and these brought light into the compositions. It is clear from these works that C┼╜zanne did not restrict colour to the confines of the preliminary contours, and he later applied this technique to his oil paintings.
The house of Doctor Gachet at Auvers
Nevertheless his paintings clearly illustrate the differences between his style and that of the Impressionists, which allowed figures to merge into the atmosphere. C┼╜zanne remained fundamentally attached to the subject and the form of his paintings. He never wholly succumbed to the naturalistic vision propounded by his friends, wanting instead, as Maurice Denis later commented, to make Impressionism into something as solid and durable as the great masters he saw in the museums.
The critic Jules Castagnary believed that C┼╜zanne was pursuing his beliefs to the limit and was in danger of sinking into some kind of dead-end romanticism, ΓÇÿin which nature was nothing but a pretext for dreams and in which imagination was nothing but private, subjective fantasies that have nothing to do with basic intelligence because they can be neither controlled nor verifiedΓÇÖ. C┼╜zanneΓÇÖs work met with deep hostility.
Disregarding the tonal division beloved of the Impressionists, he shaped motifs in patches of colour, a technique that reminded Maurice Denis of the colours in a Persian carpet. Unlike Gauguin, CŽzanne did not use areas of flat colour. He later told ƒmile Bernard: ‘I have never wanted to accept nor will I ever accept the lack of shading or gradation. It makes no sense.’
The House of the Hanged Man at Auvers-sur-Oise
C┼╜zanne, Hortense and their one-year-old son spent the whole of 1873 at Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village in the Ile-de-France. While they were there, C┼╜zanne again met Dr Gachet, who was a friend and collector of the Impressionists as well as an old acquaintance of C┼╜zanneΓÇÖs father. Dr Gachet introduced C┼╜zanne to the art of etching. The village also had the advantage of being close to Pontoise, the home of ΓÇÿthe humble and colossal PissarroΓÇÖ, with whom C┼╜zanne painted. In the surrounding countryside he painted both panoramic views and village scenes. He lightened the tonal range of his palette but had not yet entirely given up the technique, typical of his first period, of modelling the subject directly in wet paint. Towards the end of his life he explained this to Maurice Denis: ΓÇÿIt is because I cannot render my feelings at the first attempt, so I add on paint; then I add more. When I start I always try to paint with solid paint like Manet, modelling it with a brush.ΓÇÖ The impasto of The House of the Hanged Man shows this laborious process of completing a composition. The same clotted rendering can also be found in the still lifes of this period.
ThŽodore Duret related that the gloomy name given to the house, which was probably painted in the spring of 1873, ‘arose from the fact that the master of the house had committed suicide in it’. CŽzanne was more circumspect about the matter when he wrote to Count Doria about the painting on 30 June 1889: ‘It is the name given to one of the landscapes that I painted in Auvers.’ In fact the title appears for the first time in the catalogue of the 1874 Impressionist exhibition, where the canvas was shown. The painting was bought by Count Doria – it was the first painting CŽzanne had sold – before passing into Victor Chocquet’s collection. Exceptionally, the painting was exhibited twice more during CŽzanne’s life – in the 1889 exhibition celebrating the Centenary of French Art and at the exhibition of Les Vingts in Brussels in 1890. The Surrealist AndrŽ Breton, writing in 1937, thought he could detect a sense of evil in the composition of the painting. ‘The House of the Hanged Man in particular has always seemed to me to be poised in a most peculiar way … placed in order to reveal something beyond its external aspect as a house, at least in order to show it from its most suspect angle. The horizontal black mark above the window, the defacement of the wall on the left of the foreground are not meaningless details. They reveal, for the painter, the necessity of expressing the connection that is certain to exist between the dropping through empty space of a human body with a rope around its neck and the very place where this tragedy occurred – a place that it is human nature to come to see. CŽzanne’s awareness of this connection is sufficient to explain to me that he set back the building on the right partially to conceal it and eventually to make it appear higher.’ Far from being simply the expression of the atmosphere of a place, the painting marks a turning point in CŽzanne’s early years. Revealing Pissarro’s influence in its rendering a range of colours, it comes at the end of CŽzanne’s ‘couillarde’ (aggressively youthful) period and is in a series of ‘objective’ studies of nature or landscapes devoid of all human presence.
9
STILL LIFE WITH SOUP TUREEN
This still life, which belonged to Pissarro, was painted by CŽzanne at a time when he was very close to that artist whom he considered his mentor and his friend. One of his paintings “The Gisors Road, The House of Pre Galien”, appears on the left in the background of this composition together with another canvas showing some geese.
These indications allow us to believe that this picture was probably painted at Pissarro's home in Pontoise. The painter has gathered on a flowery tablecloth, a few familiar objects: an earthenware soup tureen, a bottle of wine and a wicker basket bulging with freshly gathered yellow and red apples. At once simple and rustic, this composition, with its sparkling colours, is a homage to the pleasures of the countryside. It is also a tribute to Pissarro expressing the artistic admiration C┼╜zanne felt for him.
A Modern Olympia
In this painting of Olympia CŽzanne offers a fantasy on Manet’s Olympia, which had created a scandal in 1865. CŽzanne was making a double statement with this work: he was indicating his support for the leader of the ‘ƒcole des Batignolles’ and he may have been hinting at his intention of surpassing him. A Modern Olympia, which CŽzanne himself described as ‘modern’, says much about the painter’s artistic ambitions. There are numerous differences between the two works, in the format, the treatment and the subject. Manet’s painting may be said to represent the ‘after’ scene, but CŽzanne’s treatment shows the courtesan being disrobed by a maid and thereby revealing herself to the lustful client, who can be seen, slightly in profile, sitting in front of the high bed on which Olympia displays herself. The client has often been identified with the painter himself because of certain physical similarities – the bald patch, the long hair and the beard. The fiendish black cat in Manet’s painting, Olympia’s lascivious companion, is replaced by CŽzanne with a ridiculous little lap-dog wearing a red bow around its neck.
The mood is set. Despite the overblown decor of the courtesanΓÇÖs boudoir, the scene offers every indication of bourgeois ridicule, a mixture of bombast and vulgarity. It was not by accident that in an earlier version of this work (A Modern Olympia or The Pasha, 1869ΓÇô1870) C┼╜zanne put a Courbet look-alike in the clientΓÇÖs place. That first ΓÇÿrealisticΓÇÖ painting, which used heavy brushwork with violent contrasts of colours and of light and shade, was followed by this sketchy but trenchant work. This is one of the paintings that C┼╜zanne deliberately chose ΓÇô together with two landscapes of Auvers ΓÇô to represent his work at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. By refusing to submit to a strictly naturalistic vision, the painter was clearly stating his own position within the Impressionist movement. Critics were aware of this, and Henri Polday summarized their unease in the conclusion to his review of the exhibition: ΓÇÿI would like to know if these gentlemen are laughing at M. C┼╜zanne or if he is laughing at them. The fact remains that after one has looked at this singular manΓÇÖs work, one regards M. Pissarro and M. Claude Monet as reactionaries.ΓÇÖ
Dr Gachet was the first owner of A Modern Olympia, which is part of a series of paintings with erotic themes on which C┼╜zanne worked between 1867 and 1880.
Bathers
The first leisure scene that includes water appeared in C┼╜zanneΓÇÖs works in the early 1870s, when he painted a pastoral scene with a group of clothed men resting by a river or lake accompanied by naked women. In that decade the artist began to work on the theme that he would continue to develop until the end of his life. Even earlier, however, the subject had interested him, and in a letter to Zola of 20 June 1859, illustrated with an anecdotal bathing scene, he reminisced about how young people used to enjoy bathing in the fresh waters of the River Arc near to Aix. Later, these motifs were translated into elaborate compositions, including elements borrowed from the Classics, when they were depicted as nymphs. Later still, the bathers became contemporary figures, losing all literary associations and often deliberately distorted, with elongated torsos and androgynous bodies. These figures instill a sense of alienation in the viewer: they are present in the landscape but there is no logical reason for their presence.
Soon C┼╜zanne began to segregate the sexes in the paintings, and male and female figures never appeared in the same composition. The number of figures varied from a single male figure, monumental and stiffly posed, to groups of three, four, five or even more figures. There are seventeen figures in The Large Bathers in the Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
The English critic Roger Fry noted: ΓÇÿC┼╜zanne does not have the gift of taking hold of an idea and expressing it with sufficient force to make it immediately apparent. It is as if he does not quite manage to develop his theme until he has completed the work. There is always something hidden behind what he expresses, something he would really like to capture if he could.ΓÇÖ What, indeed, was C┼╜zanne trying to express through this subject, on which he worked for more than thirty years? Was he seeking to portray the sensuality of the human form? The nudes in his early paintings of orgies and murders are distinctly more expressive and erotic than the bathers, with their apparently asexual bodies and theatrical but meaningless gestures. C┼╜zanne was attempting to go beyond the portrayal of a conventional or classical subject, whether it was real, mythological or mystical.
Woman with a Coffee Pot
There is something of Masaccio or Piero della Francesca in this large, simple figure of a woman. According to one of her descendants, the model was a servant, who would have posed for the sittings in Paris, not at the Jas de Bouffan. This may be the reason for the stiff, rather uneasy attitude of the sitter. The resemblance in the pose to some of the portraits of Hortense Fiquet, who has sometimes been identified as the woman with the coffee pot, may suggest that C┼╜zanne deliberately wanted to keep an emotional distance from his model. The expression on her face is enigmatic. Lionello Venturi noted, quite accurately, that ΓÇÿshe is standing there as firm as a towerΓÇÖ. The thick, dark hands are accustomed to domestic work, and their simplified shape makes them look like barely trimmed blocks of wood or lumps of inanimate flesh. The modelΓÇÖs body is completely hidden under the full but severe blue dress, the geometric folds of which are reminiscent of the sharp reliefs of Mont Sainte-Victoire. This lifelessness is compensated for by the vibrant rendering of the composition and the light, which modifies the colours. Here and there, spots of white light catch the folds of the bodice. The dress itself is painted in shades of blue, with green and Parma violet, which give it a voluptuousness that is absent from the womanΓÇÖs figure. There is a sensuousness in the thick paint of the milky white coffee cup and the silver-grey of the little spoon and the coffee pot. The still life, placed next to the woman, is composed of vertical shapes and adds no sentiment to the painting. This is not a casual coffee break. These elements are simply there to ΓÇÿcorrectΓÇÖ the verticality of the figure in relation to its surroundings ΓÇô a background of moulded wooden panels (either a cupboard or a door) and a wall covered with a flowery wallpaper, which seems slightly off-centre on the left. This thoughtfully balanced composition echoes the image of immutable time, symbolized by this large hieratic figure. The same sculptural monumentality is also found in some of DegasΓÇÖs portraits from this period.
THREE FEMALE BATHERS
C┼╜zanne painted bathing scenes in a whole range of formats, from the tiniest ones, like this ΓÇ£Three Female BathersΓÇ¥ to monumental ones. Quieter scenes will follow the animated compositions of the 1870s.
