Peaches, Pears and Grapes FWN 774 1879/80 37 cm x 44
One of the tricks that Cezanne uses is to scatter the colours through-out the painting: so the blue of the plate appears at middle far left of the bench top, the peach of the peach reflects on the apple next to it and on the rim of the plate, the green of the pear appears on the apple, and so on. We know how slowly and intentionally Cezanne worked, so the word “scatter” is probably not a good description of what he was doing, nor of how he did it. When I look at such a painting, I imagine Cezanne coming into the kitchen after a day’s painting of, maybe, a landscape, and suddenly seeing a plate of fruit on a bench – and he just has to appreciate its simplicity and beauty in the best way he knows - behold it in paint. It’s fresh and there, distinct and yet connected, firm and fleshy, solid and light. It don’t matter bout nothing else – it holds his full attention; he doesn’t want to know about the bench or is it a table, the chair leg in front, the wallpaper, the pair of shoes are they? at bottom right, the floor covering…It’s the plate of fruit which has offered him a greeting, bursting with life; he accepts the greeting, and in the beholding in paint, he receives the gift. What a way to live!
The first steamship had been launched in the 1860’s; but the trouble was that you had to have so much coal aboard to stoke the engine that there was no room for carrying any cargo. By 1870, the problem had been solved by the use of new and more efficient engines, and so transatlantic crossings could become profitable and productive: the steamship was the driver of global trade. One unpaying and unexpected guest could now survive the journey of this global trade from America to France: the Aphid, the phylloxera aphid is the name it acquired. It systematically decimated the ancient vineyards of France: the Midi in the 1870’s, Burgundy and the Loire in the 80’s, Champagne in the 1890’s. Between 1875 and 1889, the quantity of wine produced by the vineyards of France reduced from 84.5m hectolitres to 23.4m. The French government offered a reward for anyone who could come up with a cure – 320,000 Francs.
What happened was part of a process of re-alignment of French society, quietly subsumed under the overt crisis of the aphid. It was to be the death of the small farmer. They tried everything to cure the precious vines – chemical fertilizer, sulphur, even toads (you don’t wanna know!). To try to hold back the spread of the infection, they burned all the vines which showed any symptoms. Still, it spread. Small vignerons were wiped out, never to return. At the same time, the advent of the railways had made the possibility of intensive farming practical and profitable. The use of chemical fertilizer increased fourfold, hybrid grains were introduced, increasing grain yields by 30%. British and French cattle were scientifically crossbred, and meat consumption rose by 50%. Refrigerated rail-wagons signalled 73,000 farmers to enjoin in a co-operative in the Charentes; from which the modern dairy emerged. Commercial farming and industrial chemical monoculture replaced local produce and producers.
The Jas de Bouffan, which Cezanne’s father acquired in lieu of payment of a debt in 1859, was dilapidated and rundown: it took some ten years for Louis-Auguste Cezanne to repair it to a habitable state. The manor house itself was south-facing and set apart from the farm buildings by the local road – Chemin de Valcros. On the south side of the road, stretched out vineyards, towards the new railway line. To the west of the manor house, rows and rows of vineyards stretched as far as the eye could see, bordered to the North by the Route de Gallice – the main road to Aix-en-Provence. Cezanne painted many many paintings at the Jas de Bouffan, but none with any vineyards; maybe the vines had all been left to rot, or been overrun by aphids. He would paint many of the local peasant workers in the 1890’s, but never were they working.
After Cezanne’s father died in 1886, and Cezanne’s mother in 1897, the family decided to sell the manor house (against Cezanne’s wishes) so as to be able to divide the money between Cezanne and his two sisters. In 1899, the Jas was finally sold to a M. Louis Granel, described as at once an engineer and a vine-grower.
A new aphid-resistant stock, imported from America taken from the original French vines that had been taken to America in the first place, had to be grafted on to all the old French vines. The French government did not pay out the reward to the American scientist who nurtured the resistant vine because they argued that he had not cured their vines but merely prevented the disease’s occurrence.
The restoration of French Vines was completed in 1899; but not the restoration of the small local vignerons, nor traditional, permaculture farming: the industrial and commercial chemical monoculture agricultural system was here to stay – well, maybe just for 151 years!
(https://www.soilassociation.org/media/18074/iddri-study-tyfa.pdf)
… if you’re going to have sustainable agriculture, it has to be adapted locally. Local adaptation means that you observe in the economic landscape the same processes that you find in healthy natural landscapes: You must have diversity. You must have both plants and animals. You must waste nothing. You must obey the law of return — that is, you must return to the ground all the nutrients that you take from it. You must protect the soil from erosion at all times. You must make maximum use of sunlight. In those circumstances, you may leave the crops and animals pretty much to fend for themselves against diseases. The farm will have some disease, but it won’t have epidemics. If you look at a healthy forest, for instance, you see some prematurely dead trees, but not massive numbers of them. … It’s the diametric opposite of reductive science, and industrial agriculture is based on reductive science.
Wendell Berry