Portrait Painting (FWN 425, 1869-70)

Portrait of Anthony Valabregue                  1869/70              FWN 425             60cm x 50.2

Cezanne was born in the same year that photography was invented:  Joseph Nicephore Niepce –impressive name! – produced the first image in 1820’s but the first practical photo is dated at 1839. No longer experimental or unreliable but not yet industrialized, photography in the 1850’s was still very much a handcrafted medium, more like cuisine than science, with technical treatises that, like a good cookbook, provided the foundation of knowledge on which individual photographers could build their experience. With the increasing numbers of entrepreneurs cashing in on the developing industrialization of France, there weren’t enough artists around to paint the portraits of the growing numbers of the rich petty bourgeoisie: photography not only plugged the gap, but eventually took over the whole portraiture scene! People wanted a ‘true likeness’, not an artist’s interpretation: and with the new invention of paper photography, you could make as many identical copies as you liked. (the Security Services soon realized its potential!) Cezanne, and most other artists thereafter, took to painting family, friends, and acquaintances, rather than the rich and famous. That’s probably a bit unfair – the Impressionists probably wouldn’t have wanted to paint the rich and famous anyway!

There is a bit of a dispute about the sitter for this portrait, having been identified in the exhibition catalogue at the Orangerie in Paris in 1936 as Fortune Marion ( and you can see why, if you take a look at last week’s blog painting). The Tate exhibition catalogue of 1996 admits of some doubt and bestows the title of “Portrait of a Man”. I’ll stick with FWN (425), and their reliance on the famous Cezanne devotee, John Rewald, who names the subject as one Antony Valabregue; though some five years younger than Cezanne, he was a boyhood friend of Cezanne and Zola. He sat for a number of paintings by Cezanne, and was not over impressive with the results; but this particular one is the most flattering. In fact, it’s pretty good – so good, so “solid, impasto, and molten” that it is often dated in the 1870’s. Antony became a poet and art-historian; he never seems to have mentioned Cezanne in his publications – maybe he was more unimpressed than we first thought! He kept in touch with Zola, but contact with Cezanne faded away, even though he retired to Aix.                                                      

The search to represent a person by looking beyond their outward appearance to deep inside, was to take on an intensity as never before:  by the end of the century, the application of science combined with the thirst for understanding what makes people tick, blossomed into psychoanalysis. Freud started his search for a theory of psychoanalysis during a visit to Paris in 1885; and thereafter in Vienna, Freud, Alder and Jung would develop the basis of the study of psychology, mental illness and well-being. The application of scientific methods was bearing fruit not only in industry and the material world, but in the workings of the human mind itself. Interestingly, in the UK, one William Tuke, a Quaker, developed in York the first humane house for people with severe mental illness: he provided a home called “The Retreat”, and tried to maintain links with the local community rather than lock people away in asylums. His great grand son studied art in Paris from 1881-83, and was so taken with painting in the open air, that on his return to the UK, he went to live with the newly formed Newlyn School of painters in Cornwall.

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.                       

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.       

Carl Jung

The evolution of human development (FWN 424, 1870-1)

Portrait of Marion            FWN 424   1870      40.6cm x 32.5

Antoine Fortune Marion was a close school friend of Cezanne. Himself an amateur artist, he was one of the group who went out painting and exploring around Aix-en-Provence. Marion grew to be an ardent advocate of the Theory of Evolution, and corresponded with Darwin; he became a professor, and Director of the Natural History Museum in Marseilles. “As for young Marion,” wrote a friend to Zola in 1866 “he is excavating determinedly and trying to demonstrate to us from each snail fossil he finds that God never existed and that anybody that believes in him has been hoodwinked”                   Cezanne and Marion saw each other frequently in the summer of 1867, and indeed, Marion painted in a similar style to Cezanne; but this small painting looks later – Marion looks older than 21; the more subtle brushstrokes, the thin application of the paint and less pronounced contrasts would indicate a date towards Cezanne’s next phase when he was ‘tutored’ by Pissarro.                                                 Two paths seemed to emerge to try to come to terms with evolution: one stressing the scientific, and one stressing the creative. I like to imagine a game of snooker or pool: the scientific approach aims to explain the movement of the balls by looking at what has happened in the process to get to a result: the white ball hits the red, and the force of the collision knocks the red ball into the pocket. The creative approach tends to focus on what happens next: are we able to predict who will win the game? -no, because there’s something more at play. This scientific approach tended to reduce everything to the material cause; the creative approach tended to lift everything to a mysterious cause, a ‘god’ of the gaps. Darwin published the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, while the philosopher Henri Bergson, born in that year, would develop his ideas on Creative Evolution and claim that there was something more than simply natural selection. This battle between scientific reductionism and belief in a traditional God who provides the answers for everything we don’t know, would rage for another generation, and, in doing so, it would leave many traditional religious and secular institutions deeply challenged. We can give thanks for the struggles of the past, as we move to a new understanding about the relationship between science and spirituality in human development.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Provence (FWN 31, 1865)

Countryside near Aix       FWN 31          1865     40.5cm x 59.5

“Provence was Cezanne’s country: he was at home there as nowhere else. His sense of being grounded in so particular and so familiar a place, resonant with memory and emotion, caused him to concentrate much of his extraordinary pictorial intelligence there and to create from that landscape some of the most remarkable and original images of late 19th and early 20th century art…this was the country of his affective bond.” This is how Philip Conisbee introduces his book ‘Cezanne in Provence’. And it’s so, so true; and more, Cezanne was to discover where beauty dwells.

In this painting of the French countryside around Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne is still using his ‘maniere couillarde’ - ballsy - method of applying the paint - finishing off the top layer with full and heavy brushes of paint. Interestingly, that seems to be Mont Saint Victoire in the background: this mountain dominated Cezanne’s landscapes in his final years of life, but here it’s secondary, linked somehow with the diminutive human figure at the lower right.

There was a movement to re-instate the language and traditions of Provence: the Felibrige cultural movement initiated in 1854, by the poet Frederic Mistral. Some of Cezanne’s (and Zola’s) closest friends were involved in the movement: Henri Gasquet, the local baker, (and pipe smoker) remained a close friend of Cezanne all through their lives; Cezanne painted him late in life, trying to capture his ‘stability’ (groundedness, we might say). The son, Joachim Gasquet (who Cezanne also painted) married Marie Girard, described by Cezanne as the ‘ Queen of the Felibrige’. When human society is undergoing tremendous change there can be a variety of reactions, one of which is to re-affirm your roots, to try and re-claim your past, and go back to the way things were. This reaction did not tempt Cezanne, who never got involved in the Felibrige movement, but who, thirty years later, was to paint local people with such solidity; Zola didn’t get involved, describing Mistral as a ‘poet of the past, lost in our century of science’. Cezanne’s painting of Provence is particular, but somehow it’s not ‘regional’; it doesn’t seem to be limited by the place of its origin. How is it possible to love to be Provencal and at the same time, not be provincial? Integral Theory makes use of the idea of ‘Stages (or structures) of Consciousness’. Stages of consciousness represent a measure of our growth and maturity; these stages are to our growth as grammar is to language - they represent the ‘rules’, the structures, that seem to govern the development of maturity; just like ‘grammar’, we don’t usually think about it, we just construct a sentence, without thinking about ‘subject-verb-object’; but we can identify the rules, the structures, that help us construct our communicating. And so, we can also identify the ‘structures of our conscious development’ (our maturity). Furthermore, there appears to be a ‘direction’ in developing maturity; and that direction is to move from the self to the clan to the country and so on. Maturity seems to involve an ever-widening expansion of the heart and mind. Maturity, like beauty, is grounded, but not bounded.

I am at home here, I feel my God is near, in this place

Earth yellow green, red orange clay, star iron blue, sacred space

Out of these colours, we have come whirling, and we dance

Beauty resounds, fullness found, from Provence to boundless grace.

Apples (FWN 702, 1862-4)

Peaches on a plate           FWN 702             1862/64              18cm x 24

What do you think of when you say the name “Cezanne”? maybe the Bay of Marseilles, the mountain Saint Victoire - but probably “apples”! OK! – yea, in this Cezanne painting, they are peaches, maybe a nectarine; definitely not apples. Cezanne only painted two paintings with apples in the 1860’s, and one of those I’ve used elsewhere FWN 709 in a later blog; and in the other, FWN 710, you have to search for the apple amongst the other fruit (and onions). Truth is: Cezanne painted slowly, very slowly – peaches, pears, - soft fruit discoloured as he painted, or went rotten before he’d finished! Trouble was that Cezanne liked to paint “all of the canvass altogether”; his method was to put a coat of paint all over the canvass, and then build up consecutive layers, nuancing the colours and finish, altogether. You come back to soft fruit the next day, to carry on, and the stuff has changed its colour! Apples, and onions, Cezanne soon discovered, last longer! But hey, Cezanne’s catchphrase: “I’m going to astonish Paris with an onion” doesn’t quite have that ‘je ne sais quoi’.                                                                                       The other painting is of the same year, but by William Mount, an American painter. This somewhat randomly chosen painting illustrates a key feature of Cezanne’s still life painting: In Mount’s painting, the light source is obviously coming in from outside the painting on the viewer’s left hand side, across the painting, highlighting the first apple, and on, with dimmer, receding strength to the top half of the second apple – the ‘arrow’ of light follows the perspective, and gives a sense of depth. Cezanne tends not to paint a light source, shining from outside the painting, onto the objects. So, he has to compensate for two things – give perspective, and enlighten the painting. How does he do it? We’ll see later on. Why does he do it? Well now, there’s an interesting question! One other difference relates to the object of the painting - the ‘motif’: what is the artist painting? Mount is quite clearly painting the two apples; he uses the light source and its arrow to point to the focus of the painting - what he wants us to look at! Cezanne’s painting has no light source, and so no arrow - so what does he want us to look at? I think he wants us to look at the whole, and then the parts, because he wants the whole to be appreciated as more than the sum of its parts. And it is the ‘more’, the ‘je ne sais quoi’, that manifests the ‘impression’, the experience, the realization.

There’s a light that burns within you
that illuminates your soul
They say it’s always been there
Steady bright and in control

It’s the guiding spirit that drives you
As you live your life each day
Shining a light on the darkest paths
As you walk along the way
William Lindenmuth

The Salon (FWN 423, 1867-8)

Portrait of the painter Achille Emperaire                 FWN423            1867/68              100cm x 122

Wow – this is a painting and a half, and not just in its size! Immediately after the death of Ingres in 1867, the Ecole de Beaux-arts had organized a major exhibition of his work, among which was the painting ‘Napoleon I, on his imperial throne’ with the subtitle ‘Emperor Napoleon of Art’. This is Cezanne’s idea of an Emperor of Art! and his representation of the nobility of humanity - ACHILLE EMPERAIRE PEINTRE. One of Cezanne’s most ambitious paintings to date; Cezanne said of Achille Emperaire, ten years his senior, that he was “a burning soul, nerves of steel, an iron pride in a misshapen body, a flame of genius” – they were good friends, and fellow artist companions. Through-out his life, Achille placed his art before his personal well-being, and I think it was that dedication that Cezanne most admired, and feared; Achille died a pauper.                                                                                                                                                          Cezanne was still searching for a way to focus the energy he felt within, but at this time in his development, the energy expressed itself as a fight with officialdom (the Salon). He submitted this, and two other paintings to the Annual Salon in 1870; he was interviewed, and was characterized for the front page of a magazine (Stock), and lambasted from all sides. But Cezanne was in no mood to compromise: “yes, Monsieur Stock, I paint as I see, as I feel. They also feel and see like me, but they don’t dare. I dare. And he who laughs last, laughs best”.  The paintings, as usual, were refused by the Salon.                                                                                                                                                                    And so it came to pass – later in 1870, the self-styled Emperor Napoleon took France into a brutal war with Prussia which ended with Paris occupied, Alsace-Lorraine annexed, and the Emperor humiliated. Cezanne exchanged this painting (and many others) for paint and blank canvasses in Pere Tanguy’s art and paint craft shop in Montmartre. Pere Tanguy says he hid it away in the back of the shop, because he feared Cezanne would one day destroy it in a fit of rage, (as he had done with the other painting of the female form also submitted). Four years after Cezanne’s death, in 1910, it sold for 45,000 French francs.

Cezanne took his friend Achille’s determination to heart, and made it his own; resolving never to let money be more important than his art. One of Cezanne’s favourite authors was Horace:

“I must desert the moneyed ranks to join the poor camp of the richly satisfied.”

Horace

History genre painting (FWN 614, 1870)

A Modern Olympia          FWN 614             1870     56cm x 55

Boy, has this painting been talked about! It’s the second of two by Cezanne (this is the better one painted five or so years after the first), as Cezanne’s version of Manet’s ‘Olympia’ of 1865: In Manet’s, naked Olympia sets her eyes squarely on the viewer, whereas Cezanne places himself squarely looking at her as the guy sitting on the step. The interpretations vary widely on a spectrum from being a revelation of Cezanne’s sexual urges/frustrations to a depiction of the artist weighing up his subject. Suffice to say: Cezanne in the 1860’s (and the 70’s) was producing History-classical type stuff that was designed to make a comment about his contempories (this is entitled The ‘Modern’ Olympia!). The urge to make a point recedes over the later decades as he discovers that the best way to make your point is not by reacting to others, but from deep in your own soul: the beauty of lifelong learning.                                                                                                               

The “history-classical” genre of painting was all about the moral of the story – describing in paint what was the moral of the Bible scene, or the mythological story. They were grand designs, meant to educate, provide a lesson, maintain or sometimes say something about the social order of civilization. In those days, it would cost a farm worker’s annual salary each year to send someone to one of the new Lyceum teaching colleges. Cezanne’s father had provided for his three children; Cezanne, well-educated and intelligent, but when in Paris, he would still like to put on the act of being an ignorant peasant in dress, in manners, and also in accent – speaking in a rough unintelligible Aixois dialect. At that time, 75% of trainee teachers were daughters and sons of farm-working peasants – lowly paid, doing a few jobs to make ends meet, under the control of the local priest, and not highly valued. The 20 years up until 1870 saw education still very much provided and controlled by the Church; but that was changing.                                                                                Does education lead to social unrest and instability or does it inculcate values of sobriety and thrift? The answer presented by the new rich was that they needed more and more workers in the towns who could read and write, and who could understand each other! Free, compulsory, secular, primary schooling was introduced in 1881 with 67 ‘Ecoles Normales’, headed by lay school mistresses: the school became the monument of the Third Republic – the separation of church and state was complete.

“Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.” Nelson Mandela

Copy and go (FWN 394, 1862-4)

Portrait of Emile Zola                      1862/4                 FWN394               26cm x 21

They were like the Musketeers – they wanted to conquer Paris and the world! Baptistin Baille (later to become a distinguished Professor of Optics and Acoustics at the School of Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris, an institution he helped to found); Emile Zola (novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism) and Paul Cezanne (artist and post-impressionist painter) – “The inseperables”, they were called at their school in Aix-en-Provence. Zola had already moved to Paris to pursue his career, and was constantly trying to persuade Cezanne to join him; he wrote in 1861: ‘Of course you can work here, as anywhere, given the willpower. Moreover, Paris has something you can’t find anywhere else, museums which you can study from the masters from eleven till four. Here is how you could organize your time. From six to eleven you’ll go to an atelier and paint from the live model; you’ll have lunch, then from midday till four, you’ll copy the masterpiece of your choice, either in the Louvre or the Luxembourg…’                                                                                                                         Eventually Cezanne did in fact spend many hours in the museums, and he turned out to be rather good at copying other painter’s style. But he wanted to go further: he did not want to be bound by the past, he wanted to develop his own style, and something more: “The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Time and reflection, moreover, little by little modify our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.”

We’re goin’ on a bear hunt,

We’re going to catch a big one;

We’re not scared

What a beautiful day!

Oh look! It’s a deep, dark cave!

Can’t go over it,

Can’t go under it,

Can’t go around it

Got to go through it!

Michael Rosen

Around Paris (FWN 50, 1867-8)

Rue de Saules, Montmatre           FWN 50                                1867/68              31.5cm x 39

It was in 1861 that Cezanne met Armand Guillaumin and Pissarro at the college of art the Academie Suisse. Guillaumin’s influence on Cezanne has always taken second place to Pissarro’s; but in fact, the three not only went to college together, they worked together and socialized together. Pissarro was an anarchist and activist; Guillaumin liked to paint the industrial scenes of Paris, and encouraged Cezanne to accompany him. Guillaumin went on to exhibit in six of the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris, from 1874 over the next ten year period.                                                                                                   Cezanne gave this painting to his life-long friend, maybe as a memento. The paint is built up, layer by layer, with the final brushstrokes of paint laid as part of the visual effect: it’s a bit quirky, and maybe that’s why I warm to it. Cezanne often invites you into the painting from the left hand side; and in this one, he does that using the lighter browns and greens, brushed away to the left, opening the scene up to a gentle approach. The white house above the gentle bank is a bit abrupt: something foreboding seems to be happening in the sky above; but the central house, with the sloping roof leans into its neighbour on the left, and almost appears to wink. Cezanne brings you back down the right hand side of the painting, along with a path that looks like a stream of water. It reminds me of a little pirate’s village in Cornwall, or Brittany. But it’s Montmatre. Their connection with Montmatre rested on the firm foundations of the paint and artists’ shop owned by ‘Pere’ Tanguy, father to all the Impressionist artists, providing them with good quality art supplies, very often for nothing except an IOU or in exchange for their paintings. Cezanne often ran up huge debts to Tanguy, who barely made a living. The people of Montmatre, like Pere Tanguy were socialist by inclination and chose as their Prefect, one Georges Clemenceau, who had been a councillor in Vaucluse down in the South, and who was to became a friend of Monet and the Impressionists, and later became Prime Minister of France (in 1906).                                                                                                                                                                     In 1891, at the age of 50, Armand won the French National Lottery (100,000) and was able to give up his government job, and devote the rest of his life to art. He remained friends with Cezanne and Pissarro, befriended the Van Gogh brothers, and had a long and happy life till he passed away in 1927.                              A street there is in Paris famous

For which no rhyme our language yields

Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name is –

The New Street of the Little Fields;

And here’s an inn, not rich and splendid,

But still in comfortable case;

The which in youth I oft attended,

To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is –

A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,

Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,

That Greenwich never could outdo;

Green herbs, red peppers, mussles, saffern,

Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;

All these you eat at Terre’s tavern,

In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.

Thackeray 1811 - 1863                                                                                                                                                       “The idea that cooking is a defining human activity is not a new one. In 1773, the Scottish writer, James Boswell, noting that ‘no beast is a cook’, called homo sapiens ‘the cooking animal’…Fifty years later, in the physiology of taste, the French gastronome, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that cooking made us who we are, by teaching people to use fire, it had ‘done the most to advance the cause of civilization’” Michael Pollan, Cooked.

“One dies with genius, one eats with money” (FWN 398, 1865)

Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, father of the artist      FWN398    1865     167.5cm x 114.3

This painting is so huge because it was painted on the wall of the grand entrance hall of the Jas de Bouffan: the owner of the property set between tall and slender female images representing the four seasons, painted in the style of Ingres! I think it portrays Cezanne’s father as he would have liked himself to be portrayed – not bothered to manifest his wealth, rather to show that the creation of wealth takes hard work and application. It is the first of three formal father portrait paintings: Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, Father of the artist, and Reading L’Evenement. In the third portrait, X-ray reveals that (probably because Zola had some articles published in L’Evenement) Cezanne changed the newspaper from Le Siecle, which was Louis-Auguste’s regular newspaper: it was the voice of the constitutional opposition to the Emperor. For father and son alike, Napoloen III was ‘The Tyrant’. Cezanne’s father was truculently independent, liberal and thoroughly republican (left wing) – a man where the independence of the Aixois was blended with the illustriousness of the new bourgeoisie. There is no decoration in this painting, no sign of wealth, the hand is left like a glove rather than defined with fingers; there is though, concentration in the face, an intensity in the eye, respect in the hatter’s self-made hat, and maybe a smiling strength in the lips. ‘The historian E.P. Thompson famously declared his wish to rescue the Luddite and the obsolete hand-loom weaver from the enormous condescension of posterity - perhaps the rich hatter should be added also’ (Danchev). The portraits of “The Father of the Artist” are amongst Cezanne’s first contemplative works, communing as they do, with the inner strength of this independent man. Louis-Auguste knew his son was intelligent and gifted; he wanted his son to accomplish in life, as he had done; but, as a practical man, he knew that the production of hats was a skill of the past, and the genius of the artist was fairly precarious – hence one of his favourite maxims above. Something like Finance or Law would be a suitable career for his son. But there was no way that the young man was going to finish a law degree, with any decent qualifications! And so, by 1861, with Louis-Auguste heading for his mid-sixties, and the young Paul into his twenties, a career in law was finally put to rest. Louis-Auguste agreed to give Paul an allowance of 125 francs a month to go to Paris and join Zola, who was earning a meagre 100 francs working as a librarian.

It's not time to make a change,
Just relax, take it easy
You're still young, that's not your fault,
There's so much you have to know
Find a girl, settle down,
If you want you can marry
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,
To be calm when you've found something going on
But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you've got
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not

How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again
It's always been the same, same old story
From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go a way
I know I have to go

Yusuf Cat Stevens

Landscape genre painting (FWN 13, 1862-4)

Landscape           FWN 13                                1962/4                 46cm x 38

I’ve been having a look at Cezanne’s output through-out his life as an artist, totting up how many of the different genres he painted in each of his four phases of development (1860’s ballsy, 1870’s Impressionist, 1880’s constructive, 1890 onwards, his late mature style) and bits of it surprised me: Cezanne did 50 landscapes in the 1860’s compared with 31 in the 70’s, before he realised how good his landscapes could be - doing lots thereafter. Similarly, only in reverse, Cezanne did 90 odd “History” paintings in the 1860’s and 70’s, but, (if you exclude the mardi gras, alabaster statue and card-players – which are not really what we would describe as “History paintings”), their production declines to 20 over the final 25 years of his life. “History paintings”, those with a ‘moral’ tale to tell have had their day by the end of the century; people were beginning to be responsible for their own decisions, and not rely on church or class. And Landscape painting too was no longer about creating background images of the rich and famous in their country houses; now more than ever being crowded into the city slums, ordinary people were beginning to appreciate and long for the countryside. And artists were beginning to paint, not for the rich and famous.

This particular landscape is pretty early in Cezanne’s artistic career, and still includes working with the old palette knife (he just couldn’t resist it!) but predominantly brush. Cezanne delighted in the countryside of Provence from an early age: he explored it as a youngster with his friends, he unearthed it’s geology in quarries as a teenager, he swam in lake and dam, he BBQ’d beans, potatoes and lamb, he journeyed on tracks for miles, he studied the undergrown in shade and light, he sat still in awe of mountain and plain, he painted on long sunny days, and in wet windy ways, often from six at the dawn till the sun had gone down. He was at home in the open air of Provence.

Delacroix, one of Cezanne’s favourite painters, was said to have been passionately in love with passion: his landscapes were full of emotion, exoticism, the sublime, lush paintings with agitated brushstrokes, and pulsating in colour. Ingres, who Cezanne was not impressed with, painted impeccable paintings, textured, finished, and complete, imitating real life precisely. What was a young Cezanne trying to do with landscape painting? Was it a choice between passion and representation, between colour and line? Or would he discover something deeper yet?

“The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here.”          John O’Donohue, Beauty