A glimpse of the whole (FWN 127, 1878-9)

La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de chemin de Valcros    FWN 127        1878/9       58cm x 72

It was to be the start of their relationship. They had passed each other before, but not noticed. This one time, he had been sitting on a train, coming home, and he saw her; she said nothing, but simply drew his attention. And for the first time, he turned towards her; and he was stunned; and something spoke silently with subtle strength deep in his soul.

All the birds have flown up and gone;

A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.

We never tire of looking at each other –

Only the mountain and I.

Li Po

Poet of the Tang Dynasty, 701 to 762

Cezanne wrote on the 14th April 1878 a letter to Zola in which he describes the stunning motif he glimpsed as he sat on the train going to see his small family, hidden away off the coast of Marseilles. He had lived in the shadow of the mountain for half his life almost without noticing her – certainly without apprehending the significance she would have for his sense of awe, his expressiveness, and his continuing artistic and spiritual development. Cezanne had been accompanied on the train journey by his old teacher, now the Professor of Art at the Granet Museum of Art in Aix-en-Provence: Monsieur Gibert. Cezanne had spontaneously expressed his awe at the stunning view afforded by the train journey; Monsieur Gibert had not been so impressed: “the lines sway too much”. He did not mean the train lines, but the ‘lines’ of the possible motif – the road, the aquaduct, the mountain range – all the horizontals. Cezanne explains to Zola: “people like Monsieur Gibert see well enough, but through a professor’s eyes…..he says some very sensible and laudatory things, but always from a technical point of view”. It maybe that the good Professor was trying to help Cezanne develop his technical ability – he was certainly not alone in thinking that Cezanne needed help in that direction; Cezanne, somewhat unusually, keeps his cool and listens to his old teacher respectfully: “I was very good” he writes to Zola “since I don’t know how to be clever”; but Cezanne can’t help musing, with a touch of bewilderment: “And yet, there’s no doubt that in a town of 20,000 souls, Gibert is the one who devotes himself most and best to art”.                                                                               

 It has been suggested that nowadays there is a three stage development that pertains to individuals and societies: role, soul and whole. So, we often see relationships built on the roles that people do within the relationship; the marriage relationship involves many such roles, which though they may be changing and developing, are nonetheless essentially based on the roles that people perform. As people live longer lives, that span long after the birds have flown the nest, we see relationships becoming based on being ‘soul-mates’, rather than simply ‘role-mates’. Monsieur Gilbert saw things like a professor; he understood life through the role that he has aspired to, achieved and fulfilled to the best of his ability. And Cezanne recognizes this; but wants to go beyond the role of an artist, to something more soulful. Cezanne’s journey starts with awe and wonder, not roles and responsibility. Monsieur Gibert had to delineate the lines, and control the outcome; Cezanne had to let the awe run free, and just go with the colour. It was a journey in companionship that would occupy Cezanne for the rest of his life, before he and his soul-mate la montagne Saint-Victoire would be ‘whole-mates’.

I can’t leave it there without mentioning the colours of this impressionist painting – so delightful and intense; look at the two bundles of colours moving away from the left-side sloping roof of the manor house, up towards the mountain itself. I just love it! If you haven’t got a fancy phone, have a close up look at:  FWN 127 https://www.cezannecatalogue.com/catalogue/entry.php?id=393 – the magnified view of the brushwork tapestry of rich and varied hue, an everlasting vision of an ever changing view….sorry, I get carried away!

You ask me why I live in the presence of the sacred mountain

I smile silently, serene of mind

Peach petals wisp on mountain streams

over earth and sky beyond, for all beings kind.

Li Po

Poet of the Tang Dynasty, adapted

Holding serenity and edginess (FWN 439, 1877)

Portrait of Victor Chocquet sitting             FWN 439             1877             46cm x 38

On the 16th May 1877, Leon Gambetta spoke the following words to the French Parliament in support of a vote of no confidence brought by 363 deputies (MP’s): “When France will have its sovereign voice heard, then one will have to submit himself or resign”. He aimed these words at the French President, who had tried to prorogue parliament. A few months later, the French President resigned.

The French have, with good reason I believe, always prided themselves at the thoroughness of their Revolution. The American Revolution unfolded as a Republican system; but allowed slavery to continue for 100 years after, and the legality of racial discrimination for 200 years. The English Revolution accepted a parliamentary system, without a constitution, but retained a Royal dynasty, (the British are subjects, not citizens; to be a citizen, you have to live in a republic), a hereditary privileges system (The Lords), and until the 20th Century, a system whereby the eldest son inherited all wealth. The French Revolution abolished all privileges whatsoever, seeking that social order be based on equality of rights and opportunities.  And that’s also one of the reasons why, as one of the first acts of the new Republic, France introduced a comprehensive, and for the time, very advanced, and by 1875, even progressive, system of taxation. Taxation was to be one of the ways, along with education, whereby a more just and equitable society would emerge. Unlike today, taxation was seen as a means to re-distribute wealth to those in need.

Victor Chocquet was a tax inspector, and proud of it. He was the son of a cotton merchant. He was born in Lille, a city port right in the north east border of France. Not a pretty town, but a working city – cotton, coal, steam engines, the new railway line to Paris; lots of bars and clubs. The city chose the first socialist Mayor, Gustave Delory, in all of France in 1886. One of the 363 deputies was the future Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, who through his friendship with Monet was one of the circle of acquaintances within the Impressionist group. Lille was where the good Dr Gachet was born too, who, when he moved to Auvers, used to hold a free surgery in the slums of Paris.

It’s a great portrait of Victor Chocquet by his friend Paul Cezanne: it just captures his serene nature as well as his love of modern art, and its vibrantly colourful expression. The story goes that Victor and Cezanne would quite happily spend an afternoon contemplating a painting together, happily chatting away for hours; and yet, another story, when Cezanne was painting Victor’s portrait, taking days and days, often spending 20 minutes between each brush stroke, Cezanne would demand absolute silence, the whole time, without interruption.

On the occasion that Cezanne and Hortense legalized their relationship in the mid 1880’s, Victor wrote a letter to Cezanne which touched him deeply; we do not know what was written in the letter; we only have Cezanne’s words of reply: “I would have liked to have your serenity, which allows you to reach the desired end with certainty. Your good letter testifies to a great balance of human faculties.” Victor had two particular ‘faculties’ that balanced together in a way that just made him a beautiful person: deep intuition of people and gentle serenity. On that day when Renoir had introduced Victor to a work of Cezanne, Victor knew where Cezanne was coming from; and when they met, he knew that here was something for him to cherish. They were close, like soul-mates; and it shows:

This painting makes me smile:

on the one hand it seems so serene. The guy is so at ease, at home in his study, surrounded by his zany wallpaper, in front of his wooden bureau, in his own padded chair, on his colourfully cluttered carpet, amongst his favourite paintings, legs lazily crossed, arm casually over the back of the chair, fingers gently interlocked, in his casual slip-on shoes, wearing his loose lounge suit, patiently gazing at his friend while Cezanne works with such intensity of the eye, and concentration of the mind, and steadiness of the hand, and passion of the heart.

on the other hand, it seems so edgy.  The three paintings on the wall behind are none complete, and so blurred as to be unidentifiable; the writing desk is obscured by the human figure; the central figure is interrupted by the arm of the chair; and his head and one foot do not fit into the canvass. No single object in the painting is complete in outline.

The horizontals of the paintings, desk, floor, are interrupted by the figure of the man; and these horizontals are interrupted by the vertical of the chair on which he sits – indeed here is the rift in the painting: - the edge of the floor to the left does not meet up with the edge of the floor to the right. This allows Cezanne to swivel the chair around to the right. This is how the serenity and the edginess are brought together; this rift down the vertical of the painting allows Cezanne to put the human figure in that serene and edgy place. We do not notice that the chair seat has too much cushion considering the human figure sat on it: he is not such a tall and thin man that he only takes such little space on the seat cushion.

“No object is complete, and several obscure; everything is cut somewhere, even the figure, intercepted by the chair and the upper canvas edge; the dense fabric of paint has a constructed look; yet the whole is a convincing image of light and atmosphere and intimate suggestions of a particular time and place.” Says the author of many a book on Cezanne, Shapiro. The portrait brings Victor’s serenity and Cezanne’s edginess into a harmony that expresses the gentle intimacy of a particular time and place: when the two friends happily spent hours in silence in each other’s company.

“The location of an artist's inner tenacity is a mysterious balancing act. Artists pick and choose what to love and how to work; they manufacture their own cutting edge, sometimes in rebellion against what is fashionable. In the long run, we might all learn from Cezanne, who signed his letters “Non Finito,” or sometimes "Pictor semper virens" (ever-green painter). No real artist is ever finished.”

Russo Lee Gallery 2014

But real action is in silent moments.

The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts

of our choice of a calling,

our marriage,

our acquisition of an office, and the like,

but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk;

in a thought which revises our entire manner of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Panorama of Auvers (FWN 83, 1873-4)

Panorama of Auvers-sur-Oise                     FWN83                 1873/4                 65.2cm x 81.

Arthur Conan Doyle published his first story in 1887, Study in Scarlet. The one that always amuses me is the story about the dog that did not bark – well, one of the main clues is that the dog did not bark when the villain was stealing the horse. Sometimes, it’s as important to look at what didn’t happen, or what’s not there, as it is to look at the evidence itself. In this painting of Auvers, there are three things that aren’t there!                                                                              

There’s no modelling: that’s the traditional artistic technique of shading objects to show how they recede into the distance (fancy name is chiaroscuro). If we look at the row of cottages on the right, they’re just painted all as boldly as each other – if fact, the furthest one away is the bluer, and more pronounced. Cezanne was quite a perfectionist, and knew how to ‘model’ his paintings; but he didn’t want to do it, because he said it’s not the way we see stuff! Indeed, Cezanne makes quite a habit of not modelling his paintings; so he has to find ways of achieving the same effect. The main reason for modelling is to show ‘depth’ within painting – it’s about producing  a 3D effect on a 2D canvass; lots of people do it naturally , but it is a technical method that you can learn at art-school. One of the alternative ways Cezanne uses to describe depth in his paintings is through the judicial placement of buildings or ‘shapes’ (walls, apples, bodies…); if one shape obstructs another, then we the viewer interpret it as one behind and another in front – so, the start of depth. The row of cottages gives depth, as do all the little cottage roofs, and sides of buildings through-out the painting. But for me, what gives the painting the most depth is the curl of the volume of cottages that starts behind the tree in the central foreground: my eye seems drawn up the middle of the painting, in between the row of cottages on the lower right, and the greenery on the lower left, towards the tall white building at the back on the left (which is in fact Dr Gachet’s house), round the back of the village, and back to the front passed the high trees on the right; that swirl of the movement of the eye gives the village depth, and makes it more alive. The row of cottages on the right act more importantly as a funnel for our vision.                                

Which leads nicely to the second thing that’s not there: the greenery to the left foreground does not act as traditional ‘repoussoir’: this is the fancy name for the technique of putting something up the side of the painting to push the viewer over to what the artist wants us to see. Cezanne uses it quite frequently – think of the Lac D’Annecy, or landscapes overlooking the Mont Saint Victoire eg…..

                But here, this greenery is an attempt to locate another ‘plane’ of vision into the painting. In comparison to the rest of the painting it’s even more ‘fuzzy’ or ‘impressionistic’. Cezanne paints it like this because he wants us to see it as the hillside, but not way over to our left, but underneath where we are standing; it’s as if the viewer is standing in the shoes of the painter! So, Cezanne is trying to describe three planes – the spot on the hillside where he’s standing, the swirl of the village below, and the green fields arising on the hills beyond the village.                              

There is, finally, no fading of clarity, as we see further away. Usually, and most typically in a photograph, the horizon is less clear than the rest of the photo. But not so with Cezanne: there is a broader execution of the paint work towards the horizon, and slightly duller colouring, but the ‘hues, values and textures are distributed evenly enough to create a sense of uniform illumination, a light that encompasses, but does not determine or define” as Richard Shiff would say.                            

This stuff is all about the ‘form’ of the artwork; Cezanne rejects the traditional form of painting: he wants to be free to express what he feels deep in his being, as he sits with the landscape. In emptiness, there is a radical freedom; in form, there is a radical fullness. More and more, Cezanne will delve into this paradox as he aims for the ‘realization’ of painting to be when emptiness and form are not separate, but one.

One last personal word: for some reason, way down deep in my DNA, I love the reds of Cezanne: they delight me. There are lots of them scattered all around the painting - ‘attenuated and sonorous notes of vermillion’ says the Tate Cezanne exhibition catalogue. It’s a Study Scattered with Scarlet, and I love it!

I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water-carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Our real hope is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it.

It contains what we need!
Rumi

Inheriting the future (FWN 732, 1877)

Flowers in a vase              FWN 732             1877                     56cm x 46

How lovely is this! I invite you just to gaze, take a moment from your days, let feelings stir and words concur, for a while, and sit with a smile ……

Lots of colours beautifully blended, in such a way that it’s full, fresh, alive; simple and natural; expressive, blessed; deep as the ocean, expansive as the sky; whole and respectful; swirling, wild, tumbling – these are the words that concurred with my feelings.                                          

I say the colours are beautifully blended, but not mixed together: the paint is applied in an “impasto” way, so that you can still see the brushstrokes in the finished painting. This does two things – it literally lifts the paint towards you, and so we instinctively move towards it; and it maintains the freshness of the painting. Its fullness is formulated in the fountain of the flowers flourishing and full. It’s so fresh that it appears not quite finished. It’s alive as your eye dances to make sense of the different perspectives. The uniform background adds simplicity to the natural richness of its grounded setting. It expresses itself in the joy of living, supported by the light blue and green and brown of ocean and sky. It is a whole experience, each floret demurely gathered, yet all looking aside. The blue of the base of the vase swirls around, and the colours intermingle wildly. The greens of the leaves tumble down, unconnected by paint but brought into communion with us: “A communion of paints”, as Derek Walcott would say.

“One of the finest of Cezanne’s bouquets” says Stirling in his “Great French Paintings of the Hermitage Museum”…”Its savage luxuriance, its minute richness, the simple opposition to a uniform background  are traits of an Impressionist seeking to capture and to impose the sensation of a vegetative life bursting with sap and colour.” Stirling wrote these words in 1958, but in 1877 very few people would have agreed! One critic describes how his elderly companion is driven completely insane by the time he reaches the last room of the Impressionist Exhibition, dancing round crying “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, I’m an Impression, I’m an avenging palette knife, Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho; Monet and Cezanne, Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho…” The first few Impressionist Exhibitions (1874 – 1877) were a disaster. True, Monet and Bazille had considered an exhibition of Independent artists ten years earlier, but then the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 happened; then, just as the young Republic was finding her feet, in 1874, recession blew in across the Channel. The Industrial Revolution of Britain was roaring ahead of any other Western country, such that over-production was sending prices down, and French markets were being swamped with cheap foreign (British) goods, undercutting the home production. The initial jubilation of the Third Republic began to waver as the reality of economic recession hit hard. People didn’t have the time or money for this new-fangled impressionistic art stuff….                                                         

Yes, true enough, but I think there’s something more, and it’s to do with the way we see, and the way human beings develop. I love the story of Archimedes climbing into a bath of hot water one night, and suddenly realizing that the displacement of water offers an easy way of measuring the volume of his irregular body! Sometimes the penny just drops, and we see it, clear as the day. In fact it’s so clear, we wonder why we didn’t see it before – it’s obvious! Not only that, but it becomes obvious for everybody else. We call these moments:  ‘awakenings’, or ‘paradigm shifts’. It’s as if we need to move up a gear! But, wow, are they challenging!  In 1877, people suggested Impressionists were mad: ‘what on earth are they doing to our art!’; but by 1957, people meditated mindfully: ‘yea, that’s lovely’.

“The great and rare mystics of the past were in fact ahead of their time, and still ahead of ours; in other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past, but figures of the future. In their spirituality, they did not tap into yesterday, they tapped into tomorrow; in their profound awareness, we do not see the setting sun, but a new dawn; they absolutely did not inherit the past; they inherited the future.”

Ken Wilber

Integral Dynamics

Surfing bends and curves (FWN 67, 1873)

Cottages in Auvers-sur-Oise in winter             FWN 67                 1873     61cm x 50

The trouble with bends in the road is that your eye concentrates on manoeuvring round the bend: your focus is looking down, along the road, leaving the horizon way off in the distance. If you reproduce this exactly as a photographic copy, you end up with a huge hole at the top of the painting, with nothing but sky. Cezanne tries various techniques for overcoming this problem, but his two favourite ones are to augment the bend in the road, and secondly, to raise up the middle ground to fill more space before we see the sky. In this particular painting, the bend in the road is so abrupt that it seems to tilt around to the right, a bit like a race-track! And the sky is reduced in its size on the right, by the trees, and on the middle left, above the horizontal line of the roofs, by a horizontal strip of brownish blue, and above that by swirling browns that reach the same height as the trees on the right. The swirling light browns look a bit like clouds, but the brownish blues are not easily identified with anything: maybe trees?. The effect is to diminish what otherwise would be a mass of blue. These ‘plastic’ techniques are explained because artists are trying to represent three dimensional space on a two dimensional canvass.  

The trouble with curves of development is that you have to jump off before you reach the full potential: Don’t wait till you’re over the top!  “The sigmoid curve is an S-shaped curve on its side, and is often used in business to speak about future projections; it is the line of all things human, of our own lives, of organizations and businesses, governments and empires, democracy, and many and varied institutions. What varies is the length of the curve: Empires maybe 400 years, some more, some less; businesses used to last 40 years on average, now it is 14; human beings seem to be heading for 90 years.” (Charles Handy) There is the initial investment, ‘inception’, when the input exceeds the output, expressed as the downward slope of the curve; then there is a rise in output, ‘growth’, as the curve rises, and reaches a peak, ‘maturity’; then there’s the descent, ‘decline’, a downward slope towards extinction. The second curve, represented by the dotted line, shows how hard it can be for human beings, and organizations to change before it’s too late. It’s so tempting to continue on the same curve, in growth, in the same direction, when we’re doing so well – but that’s the road to extinction! If you want to live a full life, you have to surf!

Cezanne is surfing the lighter palette of this Impressionist period, out and about with Pissarro, trying different techniques; and playing with geometric forms combined with the natural shapes of the countryside. We see again his use of the “V” - this time upside down - in the centre of his painting; his use of colour repetition to link different parts together - the golden brown of the sky with that of the earth of the road; the red of the roof and that of the far left chimney-pot; the fuzziness of the foliage of the bottom right and the sharpness of the ensemble of roofs on the left.

Cezanne is enjoying himself; Pissarro is no doubt making suggestions; Cezanne is learning the Impressionist Technique. He seems happy enough with this painting, and I like it too: it reminds me of gentle walks with friends and family after Christmas dinner. Cezanne has signed the painting in the bottom left; so he probably paid for lunch with it at the newly opened Auberge Ravoux d’Auvers. And why not!

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,

but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” 

Alvin Toffler, 1970, futurist.

Collectors (FWN 918, 1874-5)

Three female bathers                      FWN 918             1874/5                 19 cm x 22

William Adolphe Bougereau         Bathers                 1884

The first person to acquire a collection of Cezanne’s work was really ‘pere’ Tanguy; the guy who ran the art and craft shop in Montmartre who provided all the Impressionists with oils and artists’ paraphernalia. As most of the Impressionists were struggling budding artists, he would let them have what they wanted in exchange for a painting or two. The first collector proper of Cezanne’s work was Victor Chocquet. Victor worked as a customs officer, and spent all his spare cash buying the art he liked; fortunately, because he liked the new Impressionist stuff, and nobody else did, it was fairly cheap. Victor had been persuaded by his friends that he should not go to the first Impressionist exhibition; it had such bad reports! But, he saw one of Renoir’s paintings at the second Impressionist exhibition, and was so impressed that he asked if Renoir would do a portrait of his wife, Marie Chocquet. After meeting Victor, Renoir knew that he would like Cezanne’s paintings, so he took him to pere Tanguy’s shop; there, Victor bought this small painting, his first Cezanne, for 50 francs, and was delighted. The painting itself is signed by Cezanne in the usual lower left corner; probably specifically for his new friend Victor.  

I include one of Bouguereau’s paintings for comparison: his paintings were all the rage at the time; indeed, the Academy awarded him his first honour of becoming a Life Member in the year that Cezanne painted Three Female Bathers, and by the time he died, within 12 months of Cezanne’s death, he had collected another four State Honours. Bouguereau confessed in 1891 that the direction of his mature work was largely a response to the marketplace: "What do you expect, you have to follow public taste, and the public only buys what it likes.”

Cezanne never sought to be led by public taste, just as he would never allow himself to be influenced by the Academy of Beaux Arts. Indeed, for the ten years up to 1870, he had effectively said: “I paint as I see and b******* to the establishment (maniere couillarde).” But now, in these Impressionist years, he was trying to discover how to express the beauty of the female form not in a voluptuous way, nor a way designed ‘to meet the ideals of a New York stockbroker of the black walnut generation.’ (Frank Mather, American Art historian). For me, this little painting is not making a point, but it is ‘raw’; the bathers are not sitting serenely around looking beautiful, but are energetically engaged in their own freedom of expression. Cezanne is also experimenting with shapes: the horizontals of the foreground, and the verticals of the two trees on the right. And experimenting with design: the diagonal tree on the left will, in twenty years’ time, become part of the pyramid shape of his later Grand Bathers. How do you combine in a painting the quality of its being ‘raw’ and yet being fully developed? –this was the question he posed himself.

It would be another few decades before the emergence of the ‘art collector’; or rather before the art collector becomes an ‘art dealer’. By the turn of the century, art dealers would be buying Impressionist paintings and selling them within days for 150% more than they paid. Chocquet was not an art dealer; he was a lover of Impressionist art, and particularly of Cezanne’s art. He would spend hours in the Impressionist Exhibitions talking with the people who visited them, and trying to explain what Impressionism was all about. He was a fervent follower, sealed in friendship. And he was prepared to spend his hard-earned cash to help support the cause in any way he could.

Cezanne and Victor became good friends; and their partners too, Hortense and Marie. Their family friendship was something that Cezanne treasured: his relationship with Hortense was still secret from the family home in Provence; but here in Paris, with the Chocquets, what a breath of fresh air it must have been for Cezanne and Hortense not to be afraid of expressing their relationship openly - like the fullness of a beautiful sunset.

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be.

When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner."    

I don't try to control a sunset.

I watch with awe as it unfolds.”         

Carl Rogers, psychologist and author of On Becoming a Person.

The abandoned house (FWN 113, 1878-9)

The Abandoned House                   FWN 113             1878/9                 49 cm x 58.5

Almost directly east of Aix-en-Provence, an hour’s walk along the Petite Route du Tholonet, lies a village of some 500 inhabitants who like to be known as Tholonétiens. On the north side of the road, runs a steep escarpment, the Barre de Roches, from where there are commanding views across the whole of the valley of the River Arc as far south as the mountains of the Chaine de l’Etoile. The peaks of Montagne Sainte-Victoire rise majestically to the east. On top of the escarpment, on the plateau, is the Bibemus quarry from which the stone of this abandoned house would have been built. It is an ancient land, deep and mountainous, sun-soaked and well-watered. The small river running through Le Tholonet, La Cause, first fills the small lake, Le Petite Mer, before flowing into the Arc. Le Petite Mer was in fact the remains of a Roman reservoir, which in turn had been fed by a Roman Aquaduct. It has a long history. The legions of the Roman General Marius inflicted a bloody defeat of the inhabitants in the 2nd Century. The vivid red soil of the area is traditionally said to have come from the blood of the slain. Beyond are the ruins of the ancient Chateau, isolated and forlorn, shrouded by the magnificent pines.

For nearly 2000 years, wars apart, the day-to-day relationships of life remained the same: as far as records goes back, the population remained steady at the 500 mark; all were engaged in some way, with different trades and labouring skills, within the employment opportunities, within the protection, and within the confines of the Chateau. Rent and tithes would be paid to the land-owner; food and produce were produced by the family for themselves, who probably lived upstairs, using the wooden beam of the gable to hoist up the necessities of life, while sheltering the livestock down below. The relationship between property, rent and labour remained the same also. Wealth existed for the rich 10% of the society to produce dependable regular payments so that the assets, neither increasing nor decreasing, could remain untouched by the course of ordinary living. And so, it continued, self-perpetuating, seemingly endlessly, albeit, only interrupted by war.                 

What would change with the Industrial Growth Economy ushered in by the Industrial Revolution was not primarily the relationship between capital and labour, but the nature of capital. The value of capital obviously changes if measured in crude monetary terms, but if we measure it in “one year’s worth of a country’s total value’ (Gross National Product), we find that France was worth 6 years’ total in 1700, and 6 at our millennium. But at 1700, agriculture accounted for 5 out of the 6 years’ worth, but only half a year’s worth by our millennium. Housing and financial capital account for the vast proportion of wealth nowadays. The second fundamental change is to a growth economy. The growth of the economy in the 1800’s was what it had been for millennia, barely ticking over at less than 0.5%; but after the Industrial Revolution, growth reached 1.5% and more. Housing, and financial capital were to become drivers of inequality so extreme as to rock the foundations of our society. “Wealth inequality is much greater than the differences in pay between workers, with the wealth of the top 10% richest households worth five times more than that of the bottom half of all families combined. The sheer scale of additional property wealth is an important driver of rising wealth gaps across Britain.” Resolution Foundation, June 2019. Over the last two centuries, wars apart, our society, and our climate, have become more extreme, and, if we continue on the same path, we are heading for a combustible end.

I love the atmosphere that is created when Cezanne strokes the colourful oils on to his canvasses. The low wall of the outdoor patio is not so much a barrier as an invitation to remember gentle evenings sitting with friends, with the vista over the abundant valley to the hill opposite, with the clicking sound of the cicadas in the top of the pine tree, and the house leaning back to give you more space. There are places in France that still have this atmosphere; it kind of fills you with a sense of nostalgia, and good times when things were sunny and simple, close to earth and rustic, colourful and solid. That’s one of the reasons I love the colours Cezanne uses: it provides a little escape, a memory of the good in the past, which we can, if we are wise, bring with us in to our future.

The past is our definition.

We may strive with good reason to escape it,

or to escape what is bad in it;

to reminisce

or to remember what is good in it;  

but we will escape or reminisce well

only by including it, and

moving beyond to something better.

Wendell Berry, adapted.

One city, two eras (FWN 104, 1867-8)

The Seine at Bercy, after Guillaumin          FWN 104             1876/78              59cm x 72

Quai de Bercy in Paris     Armand Guillaumin          1876/8

At any one point, and within any one community, there are people who are living together, working together, and rubbing shoulders together, in the same year but whose thinking is rooted in very different eras. Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cezanne were not only members of the avant garde Impressionist Movement, as it came to be known, but were companions and friends. They painted together, down on the banks of the Seine; they discussed and planned their contributions to the Impressionist Exhibitions of the 1870’s; they swapped notes, sketches, paintings, ideas, criticisms and encouragement about the love of their lives – art. They had been brought together in the middle of the 1860’s, by chance attending the same Art College in Paris; they had both been inspired by the art, philosophy of life and integrity of their older companion, Camille Pissarro. For a couple of years, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cezanne were neighbours, living next door in fact: at 13 and 15 Quai d’Anjou, on the little island in the middle of the Seine, next to the island where Notre Dame sits. From the Quai d’Anjou it was a thirty-five minute walk across the Seine, and along the bank of the river, past the Louvre, and into what is now the Tuileries Gardens. In 1871, the Palace of Tuileries was burned down by the Communard military leader before the Emperor’s army could finally crush the insurrection. The charred remains of the Palace lay for eleven years, a bleak reminder of the brutality of civil war: a war in a city brought about when the tectonic plates of two eras of human history clash in one city, and descend into violent confrontation.

It’s interesting that the Impressionist painters never painted any of the ruins of Paris left by the bloody Revolution of 1871. The five years after the Revolution saw governance by a National Assembly, with the conservatives (the Royalists, as they were called then) elected with a slim majority. It seems that the main concern of the people was to allow time to come to terms with the brutality of the insurrection, and the brutality of its subsequent repression: to pay off the spoils of the settlement of war to Germany, and to re-build Paris. I suspect, representing the effects of civil war pictorially was too much to endure; the effects and the emotions attached were clearly visible for all to see in the streets. Guillaumin worked nights for the Transport Department of Paris so that he could paint outdoors during the day; Cezanne was fortunate to have an allowance from his father, but had to fund his wife and young son, who his father did not know about. Guillaumin encouraged Cezanne to accompany him out and about in the heart of Paris, painting the re-building of Paris in the vibrant colours of working men and horses, cranes and barges, smoke and sky. Life was hard, but neither minded – both were committed to a society, and an art, beyond Empire.

It’s probable that Cezanne watched his friend paint this painting of the Quai de Bercy on the banks of the Seine; and then in the winter months subsequently popped next door to borrow it and make a copy in his own hand. And it’s a fairly faithful copy too: Cezanne uses deeper colours; he defines the shapes of things more than Guillaumin – the house on the left, the access road on the left down to the Quai, the people, the cart wheels, the barges and generally, but it’s obviously a copy. Cezanne alters a few things: he moves the skyline higher up the canvass, so there’s less sky; Cezanne uses hatched brush strokes, short little lines of brushstroke paint, diagonally for the sky, and horizontally for the river. Guillaumin achieves his Impressionist look by the indistictness of the paint application; Cezanne, making the shapes distinct, achieves a shimmering effect by using the hatched brushstrokes.

Guillaumin painted beautiful Impressionist paintings, in bright and vibrant colours, and continued to do so all his life; painting both the urban industrial scene, and as he got older, more and more country landscape scenes. Guillaumin exhibits in most of the Impressionist Exhibitions right the way through to 1886; and is indeed a hard-working organizer of those exhibitions, along with Pissarro. He is dedicated to the Impressionist movement, and it became his life’s cause and joy.

Cezanne gives up the Impressionist Exhibitions soon after painting this painting, late in the 1870’s. Cezanne was happy to be an Impressionist painter, to be with his comrades, develop his style, and try to develop public appreciation. But he came to realize that it was but one stage of his development, and that there was something beyond Impressionism.  

Deep down, the two friends knew it: one was content, having found his dream; the other, not content with the same dream, was still searching - a gap was appearing between them…..

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Robert Frost

Transient beauty (FWN 720, 1873)

Geraniums and larkspur                FWN 720             1873                     52cm x 39

The year of 1873 heralded a new beginning for Cezanne, and for France too.  And you can see the simple contentedness and joy, the confidence and focus with which Cezanne realizes this beautiful, bubbling still-life. For France, the huge war debt imposed by the German government had all but been paid by public voluntary contributions, German forces had finally withdrawn from French territory, and France was at last a Republic; you could feel the collective sigh of relief, and sense the determined hope for the future. Cezanne spent the whole year with his partner Hortense, and their one year old son, in the Auvers and Pontoise region, North West of Paris; in the delightful company of Camille Pissarro, Julie and all their children. Their neighbour, Dr Gachet, had created a workshop which he encouraged all his friends to share. It was here and in the surrounding countryside that they and the crew would paint together, walk together, talk together, and eat together.                                   

The year was for Cezanne transient, but oh so formative: what he learned and experienced in that year would stay deep in his soul forever. And he never ceased to give thanks for what his mentor Pissarro had given him. Cezanne only did about 30 paintings of flowers through-out his life; he was a slow painter, and the flowers simply did not last. It’s this vibrant, transient simplicity that Cezanne captures, and I think he does it well. Van Gogh was impressed too: he mentions in a letter the beautiful bouquets of Cezanne that he sees when he later stays with Dr Gachet.

It seems to me that the power of the flower is enhanced in recognizing how such transient beauty is essential to the unfolding of the evolutionary process of life;  “a most perplexing phenomenon to all who believe in any form of evolution": this is what Darwin wrote about flowering plants to Swiss naturalist Oswald Heer in 1875. It’s somehow humbling and elevating at the same time to understand, as we do so clearly nowadays, that flowering plants have been around more than 200m years, as compared with homo sapiens’ meagre 200,000; and how, together with their cousins the conifers, they support and enable our very existence. 

May I take this opportunity to suggest that you save in your favourites the catalogue raisonne under the direction of Walter Feilchenfeldt, Jane Warman, and David Nash (FWN). The first two guys collated Cezanne’s oil paintings into a paper catalogue with the famous devotee John Rewald (R), who passed away just before they finished it; then David Nash, I think he has a gallery in New York, joined the partnership to put all the work on line. As of now (2019), they’ve added Cezanne’s watercolours and everything. It’s well worth a look! I myself started to do a database of Cezanne’s oil paintings in 1999, but they beat me to it! Just to round this off, I should make mention of Lionello Venturi (V) who produced the first attempt at a catalogue of Cezanne’s work in 1936: so we generally have (fortunately only) three reference identifiers: FWN 720, is R226, is V180…..(we do not have an MB123 !!!).

Cezanne puts his signature in red in the band of black, at the bottom of the painting. Funnily enough, Cezanne added his signature later: the story goes that Cezanne paid his bill in the local village grocer’s shop in exchange for this painting; and that the shop owner, a one Armand Rondest, asked him to sign it; Pissarro and family did their shopping there, as did Renoir, and later Van Gogh (they stayed with Dr Gachet): I have this wonderful image of the Rondest Grocer’s shop lined with Cezanne’s, Pissarro’s, Renoir’s and Van Gogh’s, and I only came in for a baguette!

“The beauty of this day doesn't depend on its lasting forever.” 
Marty Rubin

Look to this day:

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course

Lie all the truths and the realities of your existence.

The bliss of growth

The glory of action,

The splendour of achievement

And the experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision;

And today, well-lived, makes

Yesterday a dream of happiness

 And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well to this day;

Such is the greeting of the ever-new dawn.

Kalidasa (adapted)

Indian poet c 400

Impressionism (FWN 63, 1872)

Vue de Louvenciennes, Pissarro-style by Cezanne FWN 63 1872 73cm x 92

Louvenciennes by Camille Pissarro 1871 90cm x 116.5

Language is such a beautiful thing! How I love to watch young children develop their expressiveness; first come nouns – the names of things, objects; and then verbs – the action words, which allow for making connections and relationships. This movement is the young human being moving through the evolutionary process that it took our ancestors thousands of years to achieve; this particular process is towards cognition – it’s the way we know stuff. This movement of going from expressing yourself with nouns to expressing yourself with verbs and nouns, seems to me to have been the same kind of development that the Impressionists discovered and delighted in! It was their joy! It was as if ‘art’, the famous art in the prestigious museums and galleries, was all about expressing yourself in nouns; painting objects, yes – albeit in minute and exquisite detail – but nonetheless objects, in a fixed and unchanging world, in exact proportions and perspective; wham, there it is! What freedom was theirs when the Impressionists realized that they could express experiences, which included ‘objects’ but went further to include the relationships between them; and the fleeting events in a developing changing world; whirl, here we go!

Pissarro’s son, Lucien, recounts later: “You know that Cezanne did most powerful black pictures until he came to see us in 1870: my father then explained to him what he was doing. Cezanne, in order to realize his meaning, asked father to lend him a picture to copy. The copy was very fine, and quite different from father’s model – Cezanne always did that – his copy was a free one, he copied everything except the actual execution.” I like to play “Spot the differences” with these two painting of which Lucien was speaking: the top slightly smaller one by Cezanne, and the bottom larger one by Pissarro: I even get out my ruler and set square. Cezanne’s is somehow kind of closer to you: for instance, the woman and child seem nearer to us in Cezanne’s painting, whereas in Pissarro’s, they seem further down the road. In Cezanne’s, the three trees on the left are more defined, they seem closer together in a little triangle, the first tree seems to lean back away from the road as an invitation to come on into the painting, and that invitation is carried on as their base is longer and comes towards you, the foliage underneath the first one is brushed away, so there’s no hindrance in our way. In Cezanne’s, the top of the wall on the right is not straight but concave: circles are always more inviting than straight lines, though not as ‘truthful’….maybe? ( or perhaps they express a more rounded truth?).

When the Impressionists tried to understand what they were doing, it involved a kind of “unlearning” of the way we see stuff; maybe ‘deconstruction’ is what we’d say nowadays. The ‘picture’ they had of how ‘seeing’ works was that the light off an object hit the eye, and then the mind translated that ‘impression’ using our learned thought processes, using all the concepts and rationality that is the skill and function of our mind, our cognition. What the impressionists thought they were doing was to paint that first ‘impression’ (when the light hits on the eye), before it was interpreted by the mind.

The awareness of the activity of the mind,

the benefits of quietening the mind and being still,

and the possibility of thereby achieving union of subject and object

this is I believe what the Impressionists, and Cezanne in particular, began to experience.

It happens, also, to be the first step in the path of meditation, and mindfulness.

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle…..

After days of labour, mute in my constellations

I hear my song at last

and I sing it.

As we sing, the day turns

and the trees move.

Wendell Berry (adapted)