Hamlet at Payennet, near Gardanne FWN 226 1886-90 62.5 cm x 91
It’s 11.00am British time, on Friday 6th November 2020, and even after three days the result of the Presidential Election in the United States has not yet been called – so close is the voting, so wide the divide and so bitter is the contest in the ‘culture wars’. The roots of those different cultural interpretations of what life is all about, the values by which people live, and the world-views or meme systems that frame these different pictures of reality, are witnessed in the paintings of Paul Cezanne.
The last few years had been very tough for Paul Cezanne: his father had died; and though reconciled with his father six months before, Cezanne, his wife Hortense and their son could not abide the antagonism of his sisters in the family home. Cezanne and his family had moved to Gardanne; and there he was able to recover from a breakdown, and find a joy once again in the Provencale countryside. His recovery was enhanced, as he circled around the village of Gardanne, painting it from different perspectives at different times of the day. Now, he was stronger: he could circle on a wider arc around Gardanne, and take in local hamlets, countryside farms, and the mountain range beyond.
For the last five years, Cezanne has been concentrating on developing his painting technique by constructing his landscapes through the application of short brush strokes of differently coloured paint – ‘taches’. Before that, he concentrated on realizing a landscape by using a palette of bright colours, resulting in Impressionist paintings. And in his youth, he had painted with a dark palette, often not using a brush at all: rather applying the paint with a palette knife, rendering paint on canvass in thick layer upon layer where the paint itself was visible and tactile. Here, now, Cezanne uses thin coats of translucent and light oil colours, around the sharp forms of cubic houses and the defined curves and edges of rocks in harmonies of pure shapes and perfect imperfections, soft colourations gifting an indescribable serenity: it’s beautifully lyrical.
1885 marks the beginning of what came to be known in France as the ‘Belle Epoque’: that period of a generation when everything was going well. In comparison to the thirty years of the First and Second World Wars that followed, the period 1885 to 1914 did look very happy, peaceful and stable indeed - well, certainly not for all sectors of French society, and not for France’s colonies, that’s for sure: such matters tend to be forgotten in retrospect! There were no more revolutions! But there were deeper global changes going on: the size of industrial output, of Europe and especially the UK, would cease to dominate the world, and be overtaken by the USA. In 1887, a young man called Bernard Berenson would graduate from Harvard in Art History, and be so promising that he was commissioned by a wealthy Bostonian socialite Isabella Gardner – coincidentally named, ‘Belle’ to family and friends - to buy art from Europe - $3million was his budget. He settled in Florence, and gathered around him men who were also making their fortunes. Charles Loeser opened a large department store in Brooklyn, New York, and in March 1887, the store was moved to 484 Fulton Street, to a new five-story building. The building included all modern conveniences including electric lights, telephone services, elevators, rest rooms, fitting rooms, and luxury duplex escalators. Egisto Fabbri was the third member of the Florence group: he was born into a family of shipping magnates; he himself became a partner to the financier J.P. Morgan. During the belle epoque, these three men would buy some 30 Cezanne paintings.
This era was the beginning of a new world value system; this one was centred on the individual, and the importance of the entrepreneur and his belief in self-reliance and his faith in pragmatism, and it birthed the connoisseur of cultural artifacts and the shrewd collector of artistic investments. “I give and bequeath” wrote Loeser in his will, enacted in 1928 “eight of these paintings by the great French Master, Cezanne, and those the most valuable, to the President of the United States of America and his successors in office for the adornment of the White House in Washington.”
Among the eight, was this particular painting of the hamlet at Payennet, near Gardanne; it could easily be mistaken for a watercolour. But don’t let the light wash of colours, and the gentle serenity fool you into thinking it is so natural as to be without artistic construction. For example, start from bottom left, and let your eye glide gently by the exaggerated slopes of the back of the roofs of the two cottages at far left, taking the eye up and over the mountain range as it conveniently dips down, round passed the highest point of the mountain range, and down passed the jagged rock formation around the bush at top right, and down passed the bush at bottom right: it’s a delight! The panoramic circle, realized with a sigh of tranquil fulfillment, that includes in a serene embrace all that is beheld.
Serenity does not come without peaceable intent, balance, inclusion, and, we now realize, much more than self-reliance.
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-reliance’.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, 1803, died 1882