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.’
