Portrait of Marion FWN 424 1870 40.6cm x 32.5
Antoine Fortune Marion was a close school friend of Cezanne. Himself an amateur artist, he was one of the group who went out painting and exploring around Aix-en-Provence. Marion grew to be an ardent advocate of the Theory of Evolution, and corresponded with Darwin; he became a professor, and Director of the Natural History Museum in Marseilles. “As for young Marion,” wrote a friend to Zola in 1866 “he is excavating determinedly and trying to demonstrate to us from each snail fossil he finds that God never existed and that anybody that believes in him has been hoodwinked” Cezanne and Marion saw each other frequently in the summer of 1867, and indeed, Marion painted in a similar style to Cezanne; but this small painting looks later – Marion looks older than 21; the more subtle brushstrokes, the thin application of the paint and less pronounced contrasts would indicate a date towards Cezanne’s next phase when he was ‘tutored’ by Pissarro. Two paths seemed to emerge to try to come to terms with evolution: one stressing the scientific, and one stressing the creative. I like to imagine a game of snooker or pool: the scientific approach aims to explain the movement of the balls by looking at what has happened in the process to get to a result: the white ball hits the red, and the force of the collision knocks the red ball into the pocket. The creative approach tends to focus on what happens next: are we able to predict who will win the game? -no, because there’s something more at play. This scientific approach tended to reduce everything to the material cause; the creative approach tended to lift everything to a mysterious cause, a ‘god’ of the gaps. Darwin published the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, while the philosopher Henri Bergson, born in that year, would develop his ideas on Creative Evolution and claim that there was something more than simply natural selection. This battle between scientific reductionism and belief in a traditional God who provides the answers for everything we don’t know, would rage for another generation, and, in doing so, it would leave many traditional religious and secular institutions deeply challenged. We can give thanks for the struggles of the past, as we move to a new understanding about the relationship between science and spirituality in human development.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost