Paysage

Having spent several years during the 1860s studying at the Académie Suisse, Paul Cezanne began to carve out an aesthetic idiom uniquely his own. Drawing on French landscape traditions, particularly the work of Nicolas Poussin, as well as the opulent hues found in Eugène Delacroix’s compositions, Cezanne started to experiment with an art fashioned from structured colour. Paysage, a rare early landscape, marks this formative moment. Slabs of colour, at once abstract and legible, define the scene, and Cezanne’s generous application of paint makes this world feel all the more real. Rich dark greens stand in contrast to the sandy coloured ground while thick, impasto clouds hint at the coming storm. A few buildings are nestled into the hillside as a solitary figure finds himself meandering down this quiet road.
Paysage was painted circa 1867 and its exact subject remains a mystery. John Rewald suggested the work depicted L’Estaque in the South of France whereas Lionello Venturi, who dated the painting to 1867-1869, believed that the subject represented was the Chappe telegraph tower on the summit of Montmartre. However, as the telegraph was destroyed by fire in 1844, and as the tower survived only to 1866, the Société Cezanne is not convinced by this identification.
Regardless of location, Cezanne’s approach to landscape had quickly evolved from one of serene classicism to the intense drama seen within the present work. The influence of Gustave Courbet’s realism and colour palette – refracted through the Barbizon School’s practice of painting outdoors – are particularly evident in Paysage, in which a solitary figure meanders through a stormy world. With its emphasis on the atmospheric, the painting evinces a powerful Romanticism. Above all, Cezanne sought to ‘develop his sensations in contact with nature’ (J. Rewald, ‘Introduction’, in Cezanne: The Early Years 1859-1872, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1988, p. 2). The artist’s immersion in the environment of Paysage is unambiguous: the painting teems with feeling and it is almost possible to hear the wind whipping the clouds across the sky. Cezanne’s use of a palette knife – employed frequently during this period – to apply swathes of paint directly to the canvas gives the image a forceful vitality. It also calls attention to the surface of the painting itself, a gesture that would come to characterise much of Cezanne’s mature output.
Paysage has a distinguished provenance and belonged to two of the artist’s most ardent early supporters: Emile Zola and Auguste Pellerin. Cezanne’s friendship with Zola began in 1852, when the two met as students at the Collège Bourbon in Aix-en-Provence. ‘We were opposites by nature,’ Zola would later reminisce, ‘but we became friends united forever, attracted by secret affinities’ (quoted in M. Krumrine, ‘Parisian Writers and the Early Work of Cezanne’, in ibid., p. 21). Subsequently, the painting was purchased by Pellerin from Zola's estate sale in 1903, the Paris-born industrialist who championed Modernism. His collection included works by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgard Degas, and Berthe Morisot; he later purchased art by Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Henri Matisse, among others. Pellerin owned over ninety works by Cezanne, a third of which belonged to the artist’s early years, a period the collector greatly admired. Many of Pellerin’s Cezannes are now located in museums worldwide including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the Albertina, Vienna, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.