Self-portrait wearing a white hat FWN 464 1881/82 55.5 cm x 46
Easter Sunday was late that year – in fact it was the latest it could ever be – 25th April 1886. Weddings could not take place before Easter, in the Catholic season of Lent, when fasting and penance was the order of the day. That’s why the wedding of Paul Cezanne, painter artist, and Marie-Hortense Fiquet, seamstress, had to take place on Wednesday, 28th April. The civil service took place in the Town Hall of Aix-en-Provence; the church service took place the day after, on the Thursday, in the cathedral church of St Jean-Baptiste. The whole Cezanne family attended, mother, father and two sisters. How things had moved on in the last year: Hortense and young Paul now formally acknowledged as part of the Cezanne family!
This self-portrait dates from a few years before the wedding. Cezanne has taken great care to develop the face, using browns, ochres and crimsons applying the paint layer upon layer till it reaches realization. The rest of the painting is left simply as a wash of paint, with the canvass showing through at the lower edge. Joseph J Rishel, in The Tate Catalogue, describes the portrait as a ‘profoundly neutral gaze’, and yes, I can see what he means. It’s kind of so profound that you’re not too bothered about the strange hat, or is it a napkin? At this point, all the academic authorities indicate how, in the self-portrait of the artist Chardin, who Cezanne studied and called a ‘crafty painter’, he is wearing a similar white napkin: well, I’m not convinced that’s the meaning of the white hat.
From beret to bowler, monk’s hat to lawyer’s wig, straw hat to turban, soft bonnet to casquette: hats were all the rage. Cezanne painted Louis-Auguste in hats, his uncle Dominique in a variety of hats, most of the Card-players in hats, himself in hats many times. In this portrait, Cezanne portrays himself in a plasterer’s hat – a manual worker, whose job it is to flatten space.
Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, father of the artist FWN 398 1865 167.6 cm x 114.3
The father of the family, Louis-Auguste Cezanne was more accustomed to the Town Hall than the Cathedral. In the uprising and revolutionary fervour of 1870, when the Communards had blockaded the streets of Paris and declared France a republic, he had been chosen by the people of Aix as their leader. He was a man from the people; he came to Aix with a skill, but no work; so he made his own business. He bought pelts from the local farmers and made hats for the townsfolk all around Provence. And when times were hard, he arranged deferred payments for the local farmers; and when the only bank in Aix collapsed, he found a partner Cabassol and together they bought and thereby rescued the bank for Aix. He’d bought the old dilapidated Manor House, and refurbished it, and helped keep the local economy going through the harsh early years of the Republic and the blight of the vine Aphid of the 1880’s. He earned people’s respect; his inner self-respect lay in knowing that he had worked hard, taken risks and opportunities in equal measure. He had no time for Town Hall meetings, nor for God nor for the self-proclaimed Emperor: meetings never got things done, God was a sentimental irrelevance, and the self-proclaimed Emperor Napoloen III was an old-fashioned tyrant!
Portrait of Elisabeth Aubert Cezanne, mother of the artist FWN 426 1870 53.5 cm x 37
The mother of the family, Elisabeth Aubert, Madame Cezanne, was more accustomed to the Cathedral; she attended church, with all her children every Sunday, and as often as she could, she persuaded Louis-Auguste along too; though more often than not he remained outside. She was a strong woman; she seems to have had recourse to some money independently of her husband, or certainly she had access to their joint wealth. The little cottage in L’Estaque – so useful for hiding away from the harshness of the Manor House’s patriarch – was indeed her cottage, and she used it frequently for herself and her children. She let Cezanne stay there with partner and child, hidden away from the ire of Louis-Auguste. She subscribed to the popular review ‘L’Artiste’, and had collected a whole series of ‘Magasin Pittoresque’. It was Elisabeth who arranged the schooling of her children, Paul, Marie and Rose; the new republic had not yet had time to disentangle education from the church. Louis-Auguste used to jibe: “Paul will be eaten up by painting; Marie, by the Jesuits”. But for Elisabeth, her inner self-respect lay in belonging and fostering a community and a family: God was her way of living in Aix.
Paul Cezanne steered away from officialdom but was accustomed to the Cathedral. He would often just like to sit quietly in the pews and listen, not to the pious platitudes or righteous recriminations preached by the Jesuits, but to the organist: he enjoyed music, it soothed his soul; except when played badly; then it did the opposite. He and his sisters went to Catholic schools, which later were run by the Jesuits. He received a classical education, and could write and speak Latin. For Paul, religion was an irrelevance where-as the Jesuits were a threat (he made his will early because he feared his sister Marie would leave the Jas de Bouffan to the Jesuits). “if I had to choose who could protect me best: the Emperor or the Pope, I’d probably choose the Pope”: for Paul, God was an insurance policy….
and yet…….the abundant breadth of the horizon, the fullness of the colours, and the solidity of earth: that experience, Cezanne often had no words to express, so he would say: ‘pater omnipotens deus’, ‘father all-powerful God’, as he would behold the landscape spread before him: it was a sacred space with which he communed through painting.
Our idea of a ‘higher power’ does indeed seem to vary according to the set of values that we ascribe to; or maybe, our idea varies according to the set of values that most fits our circumstances. Nowadays, we can look back and describe those circumstances historically, and I like to consider that there were three different sets of values from three different historical eras, all now ‘on-line’ in the Cezanne family; a microcosm of what we now call ‘culture wars’. The Traditional set of values that Elisabeth manifests in the way she lives: with its central value of belonging, and belonging in an ordered community. The Modernist set of values, that Louis-Auguste manifests in his life, based on the value of pragmatism and rationality, and the ingenuity of the individual. The Post-Modernist set of values that Cezanne is beginning to express in his art, but which he cannot yet express in words: it has not yet been born among humanity; it’s not yet ‘on-line’. But, now we know, it will be based on the value of diversity, beholding and including different viewpoints.
Nowadays, when they exist in the same historical era in the hearts of different people, we are used to describing such sets of values (cultural memes) as ‘culture wars’. But differences do not have to manifest as ‘war’: certainly, Paul Cezanne and his mother Elisabeth existed in different memes, but respected each other’s space. And by 1886, with Paul aged 47, and Louis-Auguste aged 87, it had taken a while, but they had eventually learned the value of respectful mutual co-existence.
Of other people attending the wedding, witnesses, uncles and relatives, and any of the celebrations, we have little knowledge. It’s likely that notice of the wedding and such forth was published in the national newspapers. We know that Van Gogh, who moved to Paris in March of that year, commented on the wedding, rather disparagingly: Van Gogh suggested that marriage would tame Cezanne, domesticating his art. We’ll be able to judge ourselves when we look at Cezanne’s work in his final phase from 1886 to 1906. But for me, rather paradoxically, what marriage does, is to allow Cezanne to be is more free, and more able to focus on his art. The public acknowledgement of his relationship with Hortense helps him to ‘grow up’; he can now concentrate on ‘waking up’ – to the call of the evolutionary consciousness that drove his determination to paint in a way that represented what was yet to come.
I do not trust the god you have given us
I know not which god to pray to
I’ve left in search of a new god
Donez Smith