The Seine at Bercy, after Guillaumin FWN 104 1876/78 59cm x 72
Quai de Bercy in Paris Armand Guillaumin 1876/8
At any one point, and within any one community, there are people who are living together, working together, and rubbing shoulders together, in the same year but whose thinking is rooted in very different eras. Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cezanne were not only members of the avant garde Impressionist Movement, as it came to be known, but were companions and friends. They painted together, down on the banks of the Seine; they discussed and planned their contributions to the Impressionist Exhibitions of the 1870’s; they swapped notes, sketches, paintings, ideas, criticisms and encouragement about the love of their lives – art. They had been brought together in the middle of the 1860’s, by chance attending the same Art College in Paris; they had both been inspired by the art, philosophy of life and integrity of their older companion, Camille Pissarro. For a couple of years, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cezanne were neighbours, living next door in fact: at 13 and 15 Quai d’Anjou, on the little island in the middle of the Seine, next to the island where Notre Dame sits. From the Quai d’Anjou it was a thirty-five minute walk across the Seine, and along the bank of the river, past the Louvre, and into what is now the Tuileries Gardens. In 1871, the Palace of Tuileries was burned down by the Communard military leader before the Emperor’s army could finally crush the insurrection. The charred remains of the Palace lay for eleven years, a bleak reminder of the brutality of civil war: a war in a city brought about when the tectonic plates of two eras of human history clash in one city, and descend into violent confrontation.
It’s interesting that the Impressionist painters never painted any of the ruins of Paris left by the bloody Revolution of 1871. The five years after the Revolution saw governance by a National Assembly, with the conservatives (the Royalists, as they were called then) elected with a slim majority. It seems that the main concern of the people was to allow time to come to terms with the brutality of the insurrection, and the brutality of its subsequent repression: to pay off the spoils of the settlement of war to Germany, and to re-build Paris. I suspect, representing the effects of civil war pictorially was too much to endure; the effects and the emotions attached were clearly visible for all to see in the streets. Guillaumin worked nights for the Transport Department of Paris so that he could paint outdoors during the day; Cezanne was fortunate to have an allowance from his father, but had to fund his wife and young son, who his father did not know about. Guillaumin encouraged Cezanne to accompany him out and about in the heart of Paris, painting the re-building of Paris in the vibrant colours of working men and horses, cranes and barges, smoke and sky. Life was hard, but neither minded – both were committed to a society, and an art, beyond Empire.
It’s probable that Cezanne watched his friend paint this painting of the Quai de Bercy on the banks of the Seine; and then in the winter months subsequently popped next door to borrow it and make a copy in his own hand. And it’s a fairly faithful copy too: Cezanne uses deeper colours; he defines the shapes of things more than Guillaumin – the house on the left, the access road on the left down to the Quai, the people, the cart wheels, the barges and generally, but it’s obviously a copy. Cezanne alters a few things: he moves the skyline higher up the canvass, so there’s less sky; Cezanne uses hatched brush strokes, short little lines of brushstroke paint, diagonally for the sky, and horizontally for the river. Guillaumin achieves his Impressionist look by the indistictness of the paint application; Cezanne, making the shapes distinct, achieves a shimmering effect by using the hatched brushstrokes.
Guillaumin painted beautiful Impressionist paintings, in bright and vibrant colours, and continued to do so all his life; painting both the urban industrial scene, and as he got older, more and more country landscape scenes. Guillaumin exhibits in most of the Impressionist Exhibitions right the way through to 1886; and is indeed a hard-working organizer of those exhibitions, along with Pissarro. He is dedicated to the Impressionist movement, and it became his life’s cause and joy.
Cezanne gives up the Impressionist Exhibitions soon after painting this painting, late in the 1870’s. Cezanne was happy to be an Impressionist painter, to be with his comrades, develop his style, and try to develop public appreciation. But he came to realize that it was but one stage of his development, and that there was something beyond Impressionism.
Deep down, the two friends knew it: one was content, having found his dream; the other, not content with the same dream, was still searching - a gap was appearing between them…..
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Robert Frost