Saint-Henri and the Gulf of Marseille FWN 190 1883/4 65 cm x 81
It is said that the Greeks brought the Bourboulenc grape some 2000 years ago; the earth provided the clay; the Algerians provided the skill; the sun provided the heat in this, the Val d'Enfer, Valley of Hell; the peasant farmers provided the backbreaking labour; the hills provided the gentle slopes; the mountains provided the rain; and the wind provided the mistral. A habitat of clay, vines, sun, wind, water and people.
For some reason habitats have always held a fascination for me: I remember in my teens discovering that the multicoloured marbles of all sizes that we played with, were the by-product of the glass manufacturing industry and, then discovering, with some pride, why my hometown was built on glass: beneath the top layer of soil of the twenty miles of land in from the shore in that part of the north-west of England, just north of Liverpool, was sand. The sand was excavated to make glass; and the second chemical by-product provided a pharmaceutical company. And farming of sheep and vegetables (carrots as straight as a dye!). While this habitat provided livelihoods for all the townsfolk, there was a dark side to my discoveries, tempering my pride – the link with the slave triangle of old, Liverpool, Africa and the Americas.
But now, as Cezanne paints, he knows it’s a rough and rugged scape this place, Saint-Henri, a rural habitat no longer. The vines of the grape for the local white wine that terraced the hillsides around what was once the little village of Saint Henri are gone. ‘Clay-hollows’ litter the once-smooth landscape – left-over from the excavation of the clay of the earth that had allowed the skilled potters to shape the amphora, the tall two-handled jugs to store and carry the wine. But the vines had been ravaged by the aphid phylloxera, and never recovered. Their restoration through-out France was to take thirty years, and small vignerons never survived. Amphoras gave way to bricks and tiles. The large chimney is the clue to the ‘Hoffman Kiln’ – kilns the size of rooms, surrounding a central source of heat requiring a very tall chimney. By now, there were well over 150 tile and brick factories. The crypt of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde ( to the left of the large chimney) had only just been finished last year; and it was to be crowned next year by a ‘bourdon’, an 8000 kilos bell named La Marie-Josephine – the symbol of the new industrial habitat.
Cezanne paints Saint Henri as the rough and rugged place it is. A few miles west along the shore sits L’Estaque, the paintings of which in comparison are beautifully finished and lovely, chimneys included! In this painting of Saint Henri, there are large areas of canvass left untouched, especially in the mountain range on the horizon; the row of houses traverse the middle of the painting like a barrier; the trees and foliage at near right foreground block out almost a quarter of the painting, rather than enhancing the view. It’s all a bit higgledy piggledy , and not at all like the constructive balance of colour and richness that we’re used to in Cezanne’s L’Estaque paintings!
A five-hour journey north, passed Aix, on the new Marseille to Paris train, the farmers of the Jura were starting to organize themselves. This was where Cezanne’s partner Hortense’s family lived; her parents had moved to Paris with the whole family when she was eighteen, but it hadn’t worked out for them. The family had returned to the Jura, but she had stayed in Paris. The news from the Jura was of the efforts of the peasant farmers to sustain their livelihoods: realizing that the restoration of the vineyards of France meant the death of the small vignerons, as in Saint Henri, they decided to act collectively. As a result of the coal miners’ strike in the north east of France at Anzin, ( about which Zola wrote his book Germinal), the French government in 1884 enabled the Right of Association; and so the farmers of Poligny formed the Societe de Credit Agricole, the first co-operative bank, as a mechanism to assist the peasant farmers to resist the encroachment of the industrial habitat.
Cezanne painted in the L’Estaque area for nigh on twenty years: from the mid 1860’s to 1885, with a short break in the mid to late 1870’s. It was as if he had a treasure to find: “I had resolved to work in silence, until that day when I should feel able to defend theoretically the results of my efforts”. One generation later, Braque and Picasso would go to L’Estaque in search of that same treasure.
Four generations later still, Credit Agricole would at last acknowledge that certain treasure is best left in the earth: Credit Agricole is one of the first banks to agree a strategy to protect the global habitat:
“It has taken Crédit Agricole a few years to evolve its approach to coal and get it in line with the demands of the Paris Agreement, but this is an important step which the bank has taken today and introduces some urgently needed coal realism into the commercial banking sector.
“Too many banks are still unwilling to decouple themselves from the industry which is the number one biggest threat to the climate globally and which is now on economic life support. Crédit Agricole is to be congratulated for no longer messing about, and the stipulation that its coal clients must spell out how they intend to actually close their operations is crucial here.” (June 2019).
Georges Braque The Harbour at L’Estaque 1906