Portrait of the Artist FWN 434 1875 64cm x 53cm
This painting refers to Guillauman and Pissarro in equal measure – the painting behind Cezanne in this self-portrait is a copy of Guillauman’s ‘View of the Seine’, only painted backwards, as Cezanne was doing his self-portrait using a mirror; and Cezanne’s pose recalls that of Pissarro’s self-portrait of 1873. The three of them were in fact working together in a studio at the Quai d’Anjou; they had exhibited together in the Impressionist Exhibitions in 1874 – let loose on the art-world of Paris, and making an impact, running wild!
When he saw this portrait, Rainer Maria Rilke said that Cezanne’s head seemed “sculpted by a hammering from within (and that Cezanne) reproduces himself with such humble objectivity, with the unquestioning matter-of-factness of a dog beholding another dog”. Yes, the dogs were in town!
Cezanne had hardly done any self-portraits at all till this one – just one in 1864, from a photograph, which he took a few years to complete. Then, all of a sudden, we get five in the space of two years; In this one, “Cezanne builds up the paints, which he mixes and grinds with extraordinary ardour; going back over the thicknesses to nuance the tone; sometimes his touch follows the sense of the form, sometimes it is a long slash, but it always carries with it sombre, plentiful, pigment, sculpted with an energetic lightness.”- the words of the great interwar French Art Historian, Henri Focillon.
Believe it or not, Cezanne is happy at this time, with his mates in Paris, painting well, and only 35, he just needs a haircut!
People used to describe Cezanne as “touchy”, and in quite a literal sense – as if he had been ‘flayed’; and so over the years stories grew about how he did not like to be touched, how he did not like for people to get too close to him. He described himself as constantly avoiding the ‘grippin’: he so feared that people would get their grappling hooks into him, and haul him back; that he would be tethered down, domesticated, like a dog on a lead. You get a lot of criticism as an artist: even, your fellow artists could have a nasty bite. Van Gogh said of Cezanne’s wedding to Hortense “Cezanne is now precisely a man in a middle-class marriage just like the old Dutch masters; if he gets a hard-on in his work, it’s because he hasn’t wasted himself on his wedding night” – Van Gogh was a fervent admirer of Cezanne, and though they never met, Van Gogh knew what Cezanne was trying to achieve, and so, where to bite in the most vulnerable spot!
Cezanne and Hortense legalized their relationship in part to secure the inheritance of Cezanne’s father’s estate: Cezanne always worried that his youngest sister would leave the house to the Jesuits, who ran the local parish church that she loved to attend. And so he asked Zola for advice about making a will, and later divided his third of the inheritance equally in three parts between Hortense, their son Paul, and himself. With money, and with all of life, especially his art, Cezanne developed defence mechanisms – he let his hair grow to look wild and unapproachable, he disappeared in the Provencal countryside, he acted the part of a peasant, and, later in life, he let his son handle all his finances.
Dog or no dog, Cezanne just wanted to paint, and paint he did, with deliberation: The paintings Pissarro, Guillaumin and Cezanne painted in that studio at the Quai d’Anjou and exhibited in the Impressionist Exhibitions were considered wild, and the people of Paris wondered who let the dogs out!
“On my first trip to the Modern I turned a corner,
rooted before the ridged linen of a Cèzanne.
A still life. I thought how clean his brushes were!
Across that distance light was my first lesson.
“But what conviction was carried in a sketch,
and patchy impasto surfaces with dim drawing?
What authority granted the privilege
of blurring, dissolving, ignoring form, outlawing
detail of trees without Corot’s feathery grace?
Physics had analysed light into particles floating
and the Pointillist muse was science; all space
was a concentration of dots, picnickers boating
on the summer Seine, dogs, parasols. Their refusers
rejected this change of vision, of deities; theories
instead of faith; geometry, not God. Their accusers
saw them as shallow heretics, unorthodox painters
using wriggles for tree trunks, charred twigs for figures,
crooked horizons, shadows shrieked with purple;
they were the Academies outcasts, its n------,
from barbarous colonies, a contentious people.”
Derek Walcott: Tiepolo’s hound (A magnificent, semi-autobiographical sequence from a Nobel Prize-winning poet and artist, in the steps of Pissarro)
This blog is a tribute to Derek Walcott who was, like Pissarro, of Jewish and West Indian background, a poet and an artist; he passed away in 2017.