L’Etang des Soeurs a Osny, pres de Pontoise FWN 106 1877 60cm x 73.5
That summer day, Cezanne got off the train at Gare Saint-Lazare carrying the rolled up canvas of a wood that he had been painting. A young man stopped him, and asked to see the painting. Cezanne opened the canvas, and was able to prop it up against a wall, so as to avoid reflections. The stranger was in ecstasy, especially over the green of the trees: “you can smell the freshness!” “If you like my trees” replied Cezanne “you can have them”. “I can’t afford them”. Cezanne insisted, and the admirer went off in one direction happy with the canvas under his arm, and the artist in the other direction with nothing under his arm but happiness in his heart.
A few months later, they would meet again in the café bar of The Princess of Bohemia, where the young man, Cabaner, played the piano. His piano playing was rather unconventional: he stuck little pieces of coloured paper to the piano keys, insisting that he heard colour and saw sound. His own compositions were not always well received, even at such an eclectic jazzy café. He and Cezanne became good friends. They had something in common: their wild side was irrepressible.
Pissarro had a wild side too: by the time he met Cezanne, he had lived! – walked away from a good job in the sunshine of St. Thomas, taught himself how to paint, worked his way around the world and arrived penniless in Paris an anarchist and pacifist; then this black Caribbean Jewish guy goes and falls in love with a White Roman Catholic English girl.
And here in the Princess of Bohemia, Pissarro, Cabaner and Cezanne would sit, discussing light and sound, harmony and dissonance, tones and gradations, music and painting….
This painting is rather unusual for this time in Cezanne’s life – he’s gone back to the old palette knife! The paint is applied in downward strokes of the palette knife; it’s clearest if you focus on the central diagonal line of greens, from top left, into the bend of the tree; you see that the top of the stroke has a flat edge, where the palette knife has started, dragging the paint downwards. When I look at this painting, I always think that this ‘brush’ work, with the shape of the main tree gives a certain wild look about the little wood around the pond at Osny. Cezanne and Pissarro painted this scene together, and it was Pissarro who had in the year before gone back to the palette knife: they must have been exploring something together.
Maybe, it was their wildness: that roar within, that shouts to heaven like a storm; that urgency of the soul to play its song; that precious gift of creativity to soar above. I am reminded of one of Rilke’s verses:
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
Pissarro had helped organize the third exhibition in 1877; and changed the name from the Salon des Refuges to the Impressionists. Cezanne exhibited 14 paintings and 3 watercolours – by far the most he’d ever supplied; 241 pieces of Impressionist paintings were exhibited in total, amongst them Monet’s “Gare St Lazare”. But the response of officialdom, and the general public was just as painful as usual: so brutal in fact, against Cezanne especially, that he never exhibited again for 10 years. Within 5 years, Cezanne would be asking his Impressionist colleagues to contribute to pay for the funeral of the young man he met on the station of St Lazare. It was said of Cabaner and his music: “he was born fifty years too early”.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver