CÉZANNE, Paul

The portrait of Louis-Auguste C�zanne as an old, serious and dignified man reveals nothing of the artist’s humiliating dependence on his father until the latter’s death.

This still-life featuring the Baroque cherub, the plaster cast of which is still in C�zanne’s studio, comes to life through its contrasts of rounded forms (the cherub, the apple and the onions) and straight lines (such as the canvases and the edge of the table). It also makes use of the contrast between pale and strong colours.

Inspired by Manet’s scandalous painting of 1863, C�zanne painted a wildly expressive version of the motif.

Dr. Paul-Fernand Gachet was an admirer of C�zanne’s paintings. He had come to live in Auvers-sur-Oise. He had met C�zanne through Pissarro, and persuaded him to come and live nearby in Auvers. C�zanne felt happy in the company of Gachet and his wife. One day, the discussion turned to Manet’s painting Olympia, and C�zanne’s version, A Modern Olympia, painted three years previously. C�zanne promptly took up his brush and painted a second version, unusually quickly by his standards. This relaxed painting, full of subtle irony, differs from the earlier version, which was stiffer and clumsier; it has a soft, delicate vividness which captures the sensuality of the scene.

This openly provocative and sensual painting shows a naked couple in bed, being served with a love potion by an exotic serving-maid. The picture was regarded as an offence against public decency, as well as against the Salon, and of course this unambiguous painting was rejected.

C�zanne preferred using photographs or sketches rather than nude models because he felt uncomfortable in their presence. This painting, too, is based on a photograph. It is unusual for one of C�zanne’s bathers to dominate the picture as much as this one does.

This canvas depicting female nudes in an imaginary setting is one of C�zanne’s first treatment of the theme of bathers.

The motif of “bathers,” which features more than 200 occasions in C�zanne’s work, represents naked people in natural surroundings. It emerged as a genre in its own right, of which C�zanne’s paintings serve as an example. They show groups of people lying, crouching, standing, or moving about in the open air. Turned away from the onlooker, by no stretch of the imagination displaying their nakedness, their bodies are not idealized, but appear heavy and voluminous, we can even describe them as overstretched and heavily distorted. In the composition foreground and background are closely related in terms of colour, and there is no spatial depth. The landscape and nudes merge into a quite architectural construction.

During the last years of his life, C�zanne decided to devote a number of large compositions to a motif he had painted at the beginning of his career as an artist: semi-abstract figures in a landscape. Aged over sixty, he recalled the most carefree and happy time of his life when he would go out with his friends exploring the area around Aix and spending many hours on the banks of the river. He produced many drawings, watercolours and oil paintings of these bathing scenes, calling them Idyll, Nudes on the Riverbank or simply bathers. In all, he produced some 140 drawings, sketches and paintings depicting this motif.

The theme of the bathers in C�zanne’s work can be traced back to the beginning of the 1870s. Male and female bathers rarely appear together in the same painting, and the late works are therefore very different from the dramatic pictures of the 1860s and early 1870s, in which C�zanne used the confrontation between the sexes in a provocative way. C�zanne’s aim in strictly segregating the sexes in the Bathers series was to exclude any connotations from the situation, any element of the transient, sensual or erotic. This meant that his figures became internalised, spiritual beings, and he could concentrate wholly on the purely formal, compositional problems of his pictures because they had been freed of content.

C�zanne painted numerous watercolours on the theme of Bathers. The present picture shows a sheet from a sketch album. The figures of the eight male bathers in this scene have merged into one with the lively background of vegetation.

C�zanne painted numerous watercolours on the theme of Bathers. The present picture shows a sheet from a sketch album. The layout of the landscape and the groups of figures bear similarities to the version of the Large Bathers in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. C�zanne believed that the bathers should become a part of the overall structure of the picture, echoing the rhythm of the trees, the sky and the water.

The closer C�zanne came to a comprehension of nature, the less satisfied he was with himself. It was long ago conjectured that the repaired hole in the centre of this canvas was made by the artist in an outburst of fury. Such an act might demonstrate how exceptionally demanding he was toward himself.

C�zanne rarely exhibited or signed his works. His signature on this still-life likely indicates that it was sent to the Impressionists’ third exhibition in 1877. Soon the canvas was bought by collector Victor Chocquet, who appreciated its dense pastose painting and completeness.

The sitter was a young Italian whom C�zanne painted four times in relaxed poses. He was at ease with the world, as his pose suggests. For purposes of compositional balance, C�zanne felt justified in making the youth’s right arm unnaturally long.

The tension of this painting derives from the distribution of areas of colour.

C�zanne painted a series of The Card Players, consisting of five paintings, during his final period in the early 1890s. The versions vary in size and in the number of players depicted. C�zanne also completed numerous drawings and studies in preparation for the series.

Each painting depicts Proven�al peasants immersed in smoking their pipes and playing cards. The subjects, all male, are displayed as studious within their card playing, eyes cast downward, intent on the game at hand. C�zanne adapted the motif from 17th-century Dutch and French genre painting which often depicted card games with rowdy, drunken gamblers in taverns.

View examples of Card Players from the 17th century.

The perspective of this picture is broken in a number of ways; the plate of cherries is shown from a different angle to the other objects. The picture emphasizes the fact that it is two-dimensional by refusing to use any form of illusion.

The Jas de Bouffan (House of the Wind), the former summer residence of the Governor of Provence, to the west of Aix, was bought by C�zanne’s father in 1859. This estate provided an unfailing source of peace and tranquillity for C�zanne. He may faithfully depict what he sees, but he orders nature to fit his own compositional rules; the chestnut trees are arranged more neatly in the painting than they are in real life.

C�zanne used his visits to Zola’s summer house in M�dan to paint in the open air in the surrounding area, including Auvers, Pontoise, and Bennecourt.

The landscape is only vaguely hinted at here. C�zanne has used vertical brushstrokes to create space, and has enhanced this effect by leaving small areas unpainted.

Colour was a passion of Paul C�zanne. He said that it was important for him to make fully fledged colours out of black and white, which, in the previous tradition, had been neutral and lacking in depth. In this early work, painted under the impression of Richard Wagner’s music, the formulation of that task is already evident.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser, overture

The Jas de Bouffan (House of the Wind), the former summer residence of the Governor of Provence, to the west of Aix, was bought by C�zanne’s father in 1859. This estate provided an unfailing source of peace and tranquillity for C�zanne. In this picture, the house seems to be drawing the sun into itself, almost turning to face it.

The first exhibition by the Impressionists on 15 April 1874 met with public ridicule and incomprehension. Visitors came in droves but only to mock. The present work was one of the few paintings which was sold during the exhibition, it was bought by the Count of Doria for 300 francs.

The transformation and resolution of objects into areas of colour is a feature of C�zanne’s later works. This view of painting no longer requires dramatic motifs: a randomly chosen detail of landscape containing tree trunks, foliage and block-shaped rocks suited C�zanne’s distinctive ideas of pure painting just as well as the Château Noir or Mont Sainte-Victoire.

The sitter of this portrait is probably the painter’s housekeeper, Madame Br�mont, who was recalled as having “loyally and respectfully taken care of her master.” The portrait is marked by a lyricism untypical of C�zanne’s late works.

C�zanne thought Lake Annecy, with its dramatic mountain surroundings, was almost too picturesque, suited “to drawing exercises for young Englishwomen.” In his hands, the lake becomes an opaque area of colour, and the sides of the mountains are tectonic masses.

This painting is one of the most impressive of all the landscapes which C�zanne painted outside Provence. The surface of the water appears dense and impenetrable; its effect is motionless and tectonic, like that of the mountain which stand immediately behind it, a great, solid mass.

C�zanne has used an unspectacular natural formation as his motif: a forest path on a rocky pine-covered hillside. However, the contrasting colours and interplay of light and shade make this simple subject very expressive, and its effect is due to the fact that C�zanne has painted reality as he sees it, without embellishment.

The pine that C�zanne painted several times seems here to be bestowing space with its branches. Space does not run away into the distance, as in classical perspective, but swells from the centre to the edges, becoming even more tangible as it approaches the foreground.

In April 1886, C�zanne married Hortense Fiquet in Aix. The reason why, after so long, he decided to make his relationship with Hortense official, despite not having loved her for a long time, was probable to ensure that their son Paul, now aged fourteen, did not suffer the stigma of having unmarried parents.

The present portrait shows Hortense sitting against a background which is divided into two parts: on the right is a door, with strictly geometric paneling; on the left is patterned wallpaper and the ornamental top of an occasional table. The pale, cool blue of the door is in sharp contrast with the warm earthy tones of the wall-hanging and the piece of furniture. The sitter is posed leaning slightly to one side, a motionless, monumental figure. The flesh tints of her serious, withdrawn looking face echo the colours of the background, and the opening of her jacket also helps to divide the composition into two.

C�zanne uses a similar process in his portraits to that of his landscapes: they are formal, strict, with a monumental, permanent quality.

In April 1886, C�zanne married Hortense Fiquet in Aix. The reason why, after so long, he decided to make his relationship with Hortense official, despite not having loved her for a long time, was probable to ensure that their son Paul, now aged fourteen, did not suffer the stigma of having unmarried parents.

Hortense did not share C�zanne’s passion for painting and literature, and she preferred the bright lights of Paris to the solitude of the Proven�al countryside. But she seems to have possessed huge reserves of patience and posed for the artist in endless sittings. He painted over forty portraits of her, mostly showing her as a severe and reserved-looking woman with hard, angular features, such as the present painting.

While creating a balanced composition founded on a Renaissance painting attributed to Raphael, C�zanne paints the human being as an object, refusing to soften his manner or to be diverted by psychological details. For him, nature, objects, and people compose a single material world, reproducible through paint. This unity is underlined by one of his own still-lifes, which serves as the background of the portrait.

The model for this painting is believed to have been the gardener Alexander Polin.

C�zanne ensured that his painting suggest space without destroying the unity of the surface by making use of the knowledge that cold colours, such as blue and green, appear to recede, and warm colours - red, orange, yellow - seem to stand out from the surface.

C�zanne’s son Paul, and Paul’s friend Louis Guillaume, posed for these figures from the Italian Commedia dell’arte, an unusual motif for the artist. Louis reportedly fainted during one sitting because C�zanne insisted that he should not move.

In old age, C�zanne still tirelessly walked the country around Aix in order to paint the ensemble effect of earth, vegetation and ordinary houses, in a manner at once organic and crystalline. He was particularly fond of painting his revered Mont Sainte-Victoire, towering over the valley as in a vision. In October 1906, out painting, he contracted pneumonia, from which he then died.

Mont Sainte-Victoire became a fetish for C�zanne, a sort of alter ego; he often spoke of the mountain as a person. His alter ego in the history of painting was Poussin, whose Arcadian Shepherds features the same peak hung (in reproduction) at the head of his deathbed.

C�zanne’s paintings aim at creating a permanence in the sense of timelessness, but a timelessness that also embraces solidity and flux, order and flexibility. His paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire show the mountain as the dominant motif of the landscape and the painting, a grand, monumental geological formation. Like another mountain in Provence, Mont Ventoux, Mont Sainte-Victoire has acquired an almost mythical status in the Proven�al mind.

In 1902, C�zanne bought a plot of land on the Chemin des Lauves, on an otherwise undeveloped hillside to the north of Aix, and had a two-storey house built with a large studio, some five metres high, on the first floor. He used the studio early in the morning and in the late afternoon. When it became too hot, he would paint watercolours on the terrace, which was surrounded by bushes and small trees and had a magnificent view of the town of Aix.

Although spots of paint are still used to represent areas of foliage or building, the Sainte-Victoire paintings from the latter part of C�zanne’s life are increasingly abstract. The sky seems to merge with the foreground, particularly on the left-hand side; the three-dimensionality of landscape before C�zanne seems to have disappeared.

C�zanne has built up this composition using individual spots of light and dark colour which create the impression of landscape only when they are juxtaposed. The sky contains the same green as the ground, and the spots of white unpainted canvas create an open feeling. These white areas emphasize the two-dimensional nature of the surface.

C�zanne rented a small cottage near Bib�mus quarry to the east of Aix to make it easier for him to paint in the open air. He also rented a room in the Château Noir (“black castle”), an estate halfway to the village of Le Tholonet on the way to Mont Sainte-Victoire, where he could store his painting equipment. The Château Noir was in fact a reddish roughcast neo-Gothic building belonging to a coal merchant. This was the place where C�zanne produced many of his late paintings; surrounded by pine forests, with the ochre-coloured stone of Bib�mus quarry nearby and a view of the towering rockface of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

The Mont Sainte-Victoire, a massive limestone ridge around a thousand metres high, fascinated C�zanne all his life and it provided an inexhaustible source of new compositions.

C�zanne’s main work was done in landscapes. He painted the river valleys of the Ile-de-France and, above all, his beloved hard, bright, sunbaked Provence. Over the course of decades he never tired of walking the hills in order to paint the majestic profile of Mont Sainte-Victoire, often with the valley of the Arc in the foreground and the impressive intrusion of a lengthy new railway viaduct.

In his early years in Paris, in addition to a few isolated portraits and landscapes, C�zanne mainly painted serious, gloomily executed scenes of temptation, murder, and abduction. The Pastorale also has the characteristic features of C�zanne’s early work: in unreal moonlight, three naked women and three clothed men are on a river bank. The painting can be interpreted as the young artist’s personal response to Manet’s D�jeuner sur l’herbe, which scandalised the Parisian art world in 1863.

The painting, built up using effective light-dark and red-green contrasts, shows C�zanne’s friend from his youth, �mile Zola, author of the Les Rougon-Macquart. The other figure is Zola’s secretary Paul Alexis, a journalist, writer and friend of C�zanne from his time in Aix.

The Jas de Bouffan (House of the Wind), the former summer residence of the Governor of Provence, to the west of Aix, was bought by C�zanne’s father in 1859. Its grounds, with their avenue of chestnut trees and stone pool, were the subject of many of C�zanne’s paintings. The bright colours and parallel layers of brushstrokes reflect the influence of Pissarro.

Achille Emp�raire (1829-1898) was C�zanne’s fellow-student at the Atelier Suisse, whom he greatly respected. Emp�raire lived in extreme poverty; a hunch-backed dwarf, he never achieved recognition during his lifetime. C�zanne’s portrait pays homage to his friend, showing him in a combination of dignified melancholy and pride.

The portraits of C�zanne’s father and Emp�raire, each sitting in the same chair, were painted only a few years apart. A comparison shows how much C�zanne’s style had changed during this short period: the flowery seat cover in the portrait of his father is painted in an Impressionist manner, but the decoration on Emp�raire’s chair is shown very precisely, almost schematically.

This painting was submitted to the 1870 Salon. It was rejected.

Ambroise Vollard (1865-1939) was an art dealer in Paris, one of the most glittering figures on the art dealing scene of 1900. In Paris in 1895 he staged a major exhibition of C�zanne’s works after a 20-year absence. One year later he signed an exclusive contract with Gauguin, who was living in Tahiti, and became the only gallery-owner in Paris to offer the artist’s South Sea paintings for sale.

Victor Chocquet was a customs inspector, an enthusiastic art-lover and collector. C�zanne met him through Renoir, and a warm and close friendship grew up between the two. Chocquet had accumulated a significant collection of paintings and antiques in his apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, including twenty works by Delacroix alone, and works by Courbet, Manet and Corot. When the Impressionists held their second exhibition in 1876, he loaned paintings by Renoir, Pissarro and Monet.

During his last years, living in the countryside near Aix, C�zanne worked on portraits of his gardener and of local people. These works were not intended to be detailed representations of the individual but rather an image of man integrated into his environment.. The image, constructed from fragments of juxtaposed colour, unites through the means of their identical treatment of the figure and the landscape.

In the 1890s, C�zanne found new subjects east of Aix: the Château Noir and the quarry at Bib�mus, whose reddish-ochre shell limestone had been used for building since Roman times. The strength of the painting comes from its chaotic jumble of rock faces drenched in sunlight.

In the first half of the 1880s, C�zanne painted in L’Estaque. The paintings from this period include the present landscape, in which C�zanne is particularly interested in the rocky pinnacles, scarred by erosion and covered in sparse, wiry vegetation. He has used a very limited palette in this painting: bluish-grey for the rocks, green for the vegetation, and ochre for the soil, but there are complex tonalities within this small range of colours.

C�zanne exhibited with the Impressionists in 1874, and though he shared their plein air approach, he was preoccupied by other aims. While they sought to capture the fleeting impression of a casual glance, he often emphasized the forms and patterns that build the structure of a scene. He sought to reveal the inner geometry of nature.

The present scene showing rocks in a forest is thought to have been observed during one of C�zanne’s working trips to the forest of Fontainebleau, sometime around 1893. Characteristic of his work at this time are the purplish-gray tone of the painting and the thin layers of pigment applied in a manner reminiscent of watercolour technique.

This painting is one of C�zanne’s few townscapes, painted in bright, Impressionist colours and flowing brushstrokes.

In the 1890s, C�zanne continued to paint landscapes in and around Jas de Bouffan, as well as still-lifes and portraits. He often painted portraits of himself - his most patient model. For others, the endless sittings were often torture, because C�zanne demanded that his models remain absolutely motionless, posing almost as though they were objects in his still-lifes.

Contemporary accounts describe C�zanne as a passionate, restless, yet reserved character. This self-portrait, however, does not give the impression of restrained passions. On the contrary, the artist endows himself with an emphatically imposing, authoritative, imperturbable look, which can be ascribed both to his search for what was stable in any subject and to an early awareness of the scale of his talent.

C�zanne depicts himself here as an extremely withdrawn, distrustful personality. Based on this self-portrait, Rilke described the artist he admired so much as “humble and colossal”, “meek and larger than life”.

The expressive drama of this landscape is reminiscent of the highly emotional figure paintings of C�zanne’s early period.

In 1859 C�zanne’s father bought the Jas de Bouffan (House of the Wind), the former summer residence of the Governor of Provence, to the west of Aix. Some of the rooms were in such poor condition that they were uninhabitable and remained locked up. The following year C�zanne, who was spending more and more of his time painting, was given permission by his father to paint a series of large murals in the salon.

The first pictures to be painted were probably the inner two, Summer and Winter, since the artist would appear to be less at home with the new technique of painting in these two works. The motifs on the outer walls , Spring and Autumn, are more skillfully painted.

Grouped objects (along with the splendours of Proven�al landscape) provided C�zanne with his grandest, most successful affirmation of heroic vision, as pertinent to future Modernism as it was to the continued awareness of French Classicism. The austere still-life of 1871 is in many ways prophetic of Fauvism and Cubism as well as of the late Braque.

In 1902, C�zanne bought a plot of land on the Chemin des Lauves, on an otherwise undeveloped hillside to the north of Aix, and had a two-storey house built with a large studio, some five metres high, on the first floor. In his studio he could assemble all the objects he used for his still-lifes. The ginger jar appears in numerous paintings from the 1890s, as do the straw-cased jar, the jugs and the pitcher.

In the present still-life C�zanne shows the same object from two different viewpoints: the ginger jar is tilted forward so that we can see in through the top, but the sides of the jar are depicted frontally.

Still-lifes provided C�zanne an opportunity to paint things in accordance with his conception of form, and he could subject them to lengthier scrutiny than he could human sitters. In still-lifes he could explore ways of establishing visual harmony and three-dimensionality more thoroughly.

In the latter half of the 1890s C�zanne increasingly did more opulent, spatially more dynamic, indeed baroque compositions. These pictures are far removed from the straight representation of a laid table. No one would pile crockery, fruit, a brocade drape and a crumpled tablecloth on a chest in this way. This is painting for its own sake, with its own rules.

C�zanne developed a completely new way of depicting objects in space. He reinvented still-lifes on the basis of their two-dimensionality, and used purely artistic means to give them depth. He used dual viewpoint to show objects from two different viewpoints. He avoided linear perspective in his depictions of objects, he could paint them so that their size was in proportion o to their importance in the composition as a whole.

C�zanne set up all his still-lifes in his studio. Some of the objects he used are still in his last studio on the Chemin des Lauves in Aix. Apart from the fruit, many of the objects, such as jugs, pots and plates, frequently recur in his compositions. The pictures often include a dramatically billowing white tablecloth, giving the paintings a touch of Baroque extravagance.

The pattern of leaves against the background is unusual in C�zanne’s work, as is the highly finished surface. With the exception of the primroses, the objects in the picture appear frequently in the artist’s still-lifes: the scalloped table, the cloth pinched up is sculptural folds, and the apples nested in isolated groups.

This canvas was owned by Claude Monet.

This magnificent still-life shows C�zanne at his most fulfilled and fulfilling. Here the ginger jar, pears, and flowers, all placed on a turbulent swirl of tablecloth, bespeak a world of both fixity and change, where the ceramic’s immutability stands in dramatic contrast to the passionate, organic vulnerability of the fruit and the frail, short-lived flags of waving flowers. Like Matisse, C�zanne returned to the most abundant, extravagant Dutch and Flemish Baroque still-lifes as a point of departure for his own.

C�zanne’s early paintings were dark, even during the period of his friendship with the Impressionists. Slowly, almost apprehensively, he allowed light into them. His celebrated still-lifes were most often painted against a solid background of walls, drapery, and table linen, and it is no easy task to determine the source of illumination. In the present work, the bright, juicy fruits seem to reflect considerably more light than they receive. He conveyed light by means of colour.

This still-life shows part of a landscape painting by Pissarro in the background, which also features as a painting within a painting in Pissarro’s portrait of C�zanne.

In the last 15 years of his life C�zanne was concerned only with painting. Its power grew, together with his predilection for a transient motif - the brief hours of a Proven�al morning or quickly spoiling fruit.

C�zanne painted a total of six copies after works by the Romantic artist he so greatly admired. It was from Delacroix that he learned to use colour to express the inner relationships between figures and objects.

Every object in this painting, with its rhythmic horizontal and vertical construction, forms an integral part of the rigorous structure and yet also exists in its own right. There is a stark contrast between the organic opening of the seashell and the cold marble of the clock.

In the background of the painting, sections of two picture frames and a wall-covering form a slight diagonal running through the picture. In front stands a table, cut off at both ends by the sides of the picture, its lower edge only slightly above the bottom edge of the painting and is almost parallel to it. On the table, next to the vase containing the flowers, are a bottle, a plate, and another vessel. Three apples lie in the foreground, in line with the vase. The small number of carefully placed objects are organized in a skillful interplay of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals.

The range of colours reflects C�zanne’s striving for equilibrium. The most intense colour values are seen in the flowers, where red is juxtaposed with white, and white with green. The harmony of the picture is basically determined by the subtle range of various shades of blue, which are accompanied by contrasting orange and pale ochre, the complementary colour. Around the central blue vase, which dominates the composition, the tallest flowers form a turquoise group; as if by extension, the wall has a bluish sheen, and even the shadows of the objects assembled on the table are blue.

The Bridge at Maincy, near Melun, surrounded by slender trees in glowing emerald depths, was one of the first masterpieces of C�zanne’s mature personal style that was to have implications of great consequence for future art. There is an inner dynamic and a dimension of time to the painting, as if it expressed a process of becoming. This derives from the unstrained and unfinished brushwork and from the gently swaying lines that demarcate colour boundaries.

In the hot summer of 1906, C�zanne frequently went to the banks of the river Arc. Here, in the shade of the trees, he painted colourful, semi-abstract watercolours, to which he later gave added structure using pencil lines.

The composition used in the version of The Card Players with two players is very different from the other versions. Here the background is mainly dark, and only a few light-coloured strips give an idea of space, perhaps the roofed terrace of a caf�. The scene is lit by artificial light, which is reflected on the table-cloth, bottle and pipe. The purpose of the painting is not to re-create some everyday scene from small-town provincial life, but to solve the compositional problem of depicting people in space.

A broad cross-section of male society pays homage to its naked idol, who is holding court under a white canopy in a room which looks out over the countryside. The female figure has been stripped of her individuality, and lies defenceless and exposed to the men’s gaze; she is subject and object, exploiter and exploited all in one. This painting bears witness to C�zanne’s own mixture of fear and longing for the female sex.

In 1902, C�zanne bought a plot of land on the Chemin des Lauves, on an otherwise undeveloped hillside to the north of Aix, and had a two-storey house built with a large studio, some five metres high, on the first floor. He used the studio early in the morning and in the late afternoon. When it became too hot, he would paint watercolours on the terrace, which was surrounded by bushes and small trees and had a magnificent view of the town of Aix. From time to time, local agricultural workers or his gardener Vallier would sit for him, for example for this painting.

From late 1872 to the spring of 1874, C�zanne lived in Dr. Paul Gachet’s house in Auvers-sur-Oise. Dr. Gachet was the first person to buy pictures from him. In the present painting showing his house the sequence of houses arranged along the curve of the road is striking. Constructivism can already be detected in them, C�zanne’s striving for increasing clarity and unity of composition is felt here.

Although C�zanne’s paintings from this period are brighter and more vibrant than his early works, they are more strictly composed than those of the Impressionists who, like him, came to Auvers to paint.

C�zanne painted three large versions of the female bathers, all during the last seven years of his life. The version in Philadelphia is the largest. This was the first time that C�zanne had painted such a monumental canvas. Two other versions are in The Barnes Foundation, Merion, and in the National Gallery, London.

The figures in all three compositions are remarkably simply and coarsely painted. The female creatures frolicking on the riverbank are not graceful, rather they are sturdy, angular, oddly proportioned and plump, and have nothing erotic about them. C�zanne avoided any suggestion of individuality and instead has generalised the figures in the same way as the landscapes, so that both have equal artistic weight.

The Merion version of the Large Bathers is said to have taken five years to paint. This is not the result of any uncertainty in its dating, C�zannne really did spend so long painting it. His extremely slow way of working and dissatisfaction with the results of his efforts led him to leave a number of paintings unfinished.

C�zanne painted three large versions of the female bathers, all during the last seven years of his life. The version in Philadelphia is the largest. This was the first time that C�zanne had painted such a monumental canvas. Two other versions are in The Barnes Foundation, Merion, and in the National Gallery, London.

The figures in all three compositions are remarkably simply and coarsely painted. The female creatures frolicking on the riverbank are not graceful, rather they are sturdy, angular, oddly proportioned and plump, and have nothing erotic about them. C�zanne avoided any suggestion of individuality and instead has generalised the figures in the same way as the landscapes, so that both have equal artistic weight.

C�zanne painted three large versions of the female bathers, all during the last seven years of his life. The version in Philadelphia is the largest. This was the first time that C�zanne had painted such a monumental canvas. Two other versions are in The Barnes Foundation, Merion, and in the National Gallery, London.

The figures in all three compositions are remarkably simply and coarsely painted. The female creatures frolicking on the riverbank are not graceful, rather they are sturdy, angular, oddly proportioned and plump, and have nothing erotic about them. C�zanne avoided any suggestion of individuality and instead has generalised the figures in the same way as the landscapes, so that both have equal artistic weight.

In the Philadelphia version, C�zanne has focused on the trunks which bear the weight of the trees. These create a framework which is both static and dynamic. The figures are also aligned in the same way as the trees; this is probably most apparent in the female figure on the far left, whose upper body and left leg are inclined at exactly the same angle as the tree trunk. However, the contours and arms of the other figures also echo the geometry of the framework.

C�zanne spent more than seven years working on this version. The strict triangular composition makes it the most classical of this series.

An oil mill was to have been built near the Château Noir, but this project was never completed. The stones which were left lying around, half-covered in vegetation, provided a motif for C�zanne. They enabled him to create a harmonious relationship between cool and warm colours and between geometric and organic forms.

C�zanne repeatedly depicted the themes of the war between the sexes and of seduction. The grainy colour of this particular painting is reminiscent of a Venetian mural.

C�zanne painted this ordinary-looking landscape near Aix in the bright colour of the Impressionists, but without creating atmosphere by resolving the forms. This is the first of his paintings to feature the mountain he loved so much, Mont Saint-Victoire.

In the summer of 1876, C�zanne went to L’Estaque, which was then an idyllic fishing village on a bay in the Mediterranean, to paint landscapes. At that time he had clearly learned a great deal from Pissarro, and added a great deal of his own. This brightly coloured seascapes is serene and formal. The painting is carefully structures, with the strong colours - the terracotta roof tiles, the green foliage, the blue surface of the water - covering the surface of the canvas with an even intensity.