Peaches on a plate FWN 702 1862/64 18cm x 24
What do you think of when you say the name “Cezanne”? maybe the Bay of Marseilles, the mountain Saint Victoire - but probably “apples”! OK! – yea, in this Cezanne painting, they are peaches, maybe a nectarine; definitely not apples. Cezanne only painted two paintings with apples in the 1860’s, and one of those I’ve used elsewhere FWN 709 in a later blog; and in the other, FWN 710, you have to search for the apple amongst the other fruit (and onions). Truth is: Cezanne painted slowly, very slowly – peaches, pears, - soft fruit discoloured as he painted, or went rotten before he’d finished! Trouble was that Cezanne liked to paint “all of the canvass altogether”; his method was to put a coat of paint all over the canvass, and then build up consecutive layers, nuancing the colours and finish, altogether. You come back to soft fruit the next day, to carry on, and the stuff has changed its colour! Apples, and onions, Cezanne soon discovered, last longer! But hey, Cezanne’s catchphrase: “I’m going to astonish Paris with an onion” doesn’t quite have that ‘je ne sais quoi’. The other painting is of the same year, but by William Mount, an American painter. This somewhat randomly chosen painting illustrates a key feature of Cezanne’s still life painting: In Mount’s painting, the light source is obviously coming in from outside the painting on the viewer’s left hand side, across the painting, highlighting the first apple, and on, with dimmer, receding strength to the top half of the second apple – the ‘arrow’ of light follows the perspective, and gives a sense of depth. Cezanne tends not to paint a light source, shining from outside the painting, onto the objects. So, he has to compensate for two things – give perspective, and enlighten the painting. How does he do it? We’ll see later on. Why does he do it? Well now, there’s an interesting question! One other difference relates to the object of the painting - the ‘motif’: what is the artist painting? Mount is quite clearly painting the two apples; he uses the light source and its arrow to point to the focus of the painting - what he wants us to look at! Cezanne’s painting has no light source, and so no arrow - so what does he want us to look at? I think he wants us to look at the whole, and then the parts, because he wants the whole to be appreciated as more than the sum of its parts. And it is the ‘more’, the ‘je ne sais quoi’, that manifests the ‘impression’, the experience, the realization.
There’s a light that burns within you
that illuminates your soul
They say it’s always been there
Steady bright and in control
It’s the guiding spirit that drives you
As you live your life each day
Shining a light on the darkest paths
As you walk along the way
William Lindenmuth