St. Petersburg
He was also prone, when moving from one studio to another, to forget to take with him dozens of paintings he considered unfinished. He hoped eventually to render his entire vision of the world in one great, complete work of art, as did the geniuses of classical painting, and having “redone Nature according to Poussin,” to emulate Poussin.
The Madeleine or Sorrow
1868–1869
Oil on canvas, 165 × 125 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
But to a person living at the end of the nineteenth century the surrounding reality seemed far more complex and unstable than to someone living in Poussin’s time. Cézanne devoted many years to the search for such means, hoping eventually to bring them all together.
Green Pot and Tin Kettle
c. 1869
Oil on canvas, 64 × 81 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
His ultimate aim was to paint a masterpiece, and he did create many works that we now consider to be masterpieces. But apart from that, he evolved a new creative method and a new artistic system which he adhered to consistently throughout his life.
Luncheon on the Grass
1869–1870
Private Collection, Paris
In creating this system he contributed to the birth of twentieth-century art. It would be useless to look for the essence and meaning of Cézanne’s new artistic system in his own pronouncements. Cézanne had no use for thoughts on art expressed by any other means except “with brush in hand.”
Portrait of Anthony Valabrègue
1869–1871
Oil on canvas, 60.4 × 50.2 cm
J. P. Getty Museum, Malibu
His pronouncements bear the stamp not so much of theoretical postulates as of practical advice to fellow artists. It is not therefore to the artist’s theoretical statements but to his works that we must look for an explanation of how his creative method gradually came into its own, how the links of the whole chain which today we justly call “Cézanne’s artistic system” were forged.
Pastoral
1870
Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
In April 1861, the 22-year-old Paul Cézanne, son of a wealthy banker in Aix-en-Provence, arrived in Paris. His aim, his passion, his most fervent wish was to devote himself body and soul to art. Behind him was a solid classical education received in the college of Aix, rather modest successes (according to his teachers) at the local school of drawing and, above all, years of rapturous absorption of the unrestrained romanticism of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Charles Baudelaire, years of youthful dreaming, together with Émile Zola, of the lofty calling of the artist and of their future collaboration in the field of art.
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