Still Life in Watercolors

Carol Armstrong (Princeton: Princeton University
Art Museum, 2002), 13-25, esp. 14; also in Gôtz
Adriani, Cézanne Watercolors, trans. Russell M.
Stockman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 21.
7. "Quand j'étais a Aix, il me semblait que je
serais mieux autre part, maintenant que je suis ici,
je regrette Aix" (Cézanne to Solari, Talloires, July 23,
1896, cited in Denis Coutagne and Bruno Ely, Les
Sites cézanniennes du pays d'Aix: Hommage à
John Rewald [Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux,
1996], 197).
8. "Et n'eût été que j'aime énormément la configuration
de mon pays, je ne serai pas ici." What
he complained of were "les prétensions des intellectuels
de mon pays, tas d'enculés, de crétins
et de drôles—les steppes de la bonne ville d'Aix"
(ibid., 228).
9. "En nous ne s'est pas endormie la vibration de
sensations répercutées de ce bon soleil de Provence,
nos vieux souvenirs de jeunesse, de ces horizons,
de ces paysages, de ces lignes inouïes, qui laissent
en nous tant d'impressions profondes" (Cézanne
to Henri Gasquet, June 1899, cited ibid., 198).
10. Complaining about the old Aix, Cézanne also
bemoaned the efforts to modernize it, concluding,
"J'y suis né; j'y mourrai. . . . Aujourd'hui tout change
en réalité, mais non pour moi, je vis dans la ville
de mon enfance, et c'est dans le regard des gens
de mon âge que je revois le passé" (ibid., 228).
11. Cézanne tried twice to get into the Ecole des
Beaux Arts in the early sixties, without success.
After that, he submitted works to the Salon in 1863,
1865, 1866, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1870, 1872, 1876,
1879, l88o > l88l > l882 > and l88 4- He nad a still life
in the Salon des Refusés of 1863 and a portrait
accepted into the Salon of 1882, but only because he
got around the jury by listing himself as a student
of another painter, a loophole that was rescinded
the following year. Otherwise none of his Salon submissions
was accepted. He did not participate in any
of the Impressionist exhibitions after 1877 but did
begin exhibiting with Les Vingt in Brussels in 1889.
Thereafter he had other exhibition opportunities,
he began to acquire a critical following, and he was
financially independent because of the inheritance
he received after the death of his father in 1886.
But up until then he was alone among the "new
painters" in his utter lack of Salon success and his
persistence in spite of it.
12. Théodore Duret, Histoire d'Edouard Manet et
son oeuvre (Paris: H. Floury, 1902), 63-64; Adolphe
Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard,
1947), 117; cited in Cachin and Rishel, Cézanne,
534- Clearly Cezanne's provincial persona was
modeled on that of Courbet, who had deliberately
fashioned himself as a rural outsider in the Parisian
art world in the 18405 and 18505. See T. J. Clark,
Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the
1848 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1982).
13. Pissarro to his son Lucien, December 4, 1895,
in Janine Bailly-Herzberg, éd., Correspondance
de Camille Pissarro (Paris: Presses universitaires
de Paris, 1980-91), vol. 4, no. 1181, 128, cited in
Cachin and Rishel, Cézanne, 531.
14. "Ce peintre trop oublié, M. Cézanne" (}. K.
Huysmans, "Cézanne" [1888], in Certains, in L'art
moderne/Certains [Paris: Union générale d'éditions,
WSl» 2 ? 1 )-
15. L'Oeuvre, or The Masterpiece, came out early in
1886, and Cézanne wrote to Zola for the last time in
March of that year, thanking him coldly and speaking
of their friendship in the past tense. Zola's novel
was an updating of two artist stories that Cézanne
admired, Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu and the
Concourt brothers' Manette Salomon, but it also represented
an indictment of modern art and a slanderous
characterization of Cézanne, whose irregular
relationship with Hortense and soon-to-be-famous
anxieties about women, not to mention his black
moods and ill-controlled temper, were thinly veiled
and combined with the figures of Manet and Monet
in the failed, suicidal protagonist Claude Lantier.
The Masterpiece amounted to a reversal of Zola's
earlier championing of Manet and the "new painting"
and, in Cezanne's view, a betrayal of their childhood
friendship. See Robert J. Niess, Zola, Cézanne,
and Manet: A Study of "L'Oeuvre" (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1968); J. Berg, The
Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1992); and my Manet Manette (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 64-68.
16. Van Gogh to Bernard, August 1888, in Vincent
van Gogh, Correspondance générale, trans. Maurice
Beerblock and Louis Roëlandt (Paris, 1990), vol. 3,
236-40; cited in Cachin and Rishel, Cézanne, 548.
17. Cezanne's friends and family disliked Hortense,
and following the fine old tradition of the wife as
the impediment to the genius, most accounts of
Cezanne's life have been unsympathetic to her and
laid the blame for the difficulties between the couple
at her door. But Cézanne himself cannot have
been easy to live with. Indeed, there is at least one
suggestion that he may have been all but schizophrenic;
see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne's
Doubt," in Sense and Non-sense, trans. Hubert L.
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO