The fishers’ village of L’Estaque FWN 49 1867/9 42cm x 55
The style of this medium sized painting is pretty unusual for Cezanne at this time: the famous British Art critic Roger Fry who was entranced by the work of Cezanne describes it as melancholy and brooding (1927). Personally, it doesn’t strike me that way; I like the colours and the close-up, high angle and cluster of view-points (that Cezanne would so refine in his later work) – it makes me smile! But it is, maybe, the quiet before the storm, as Napoleon III led France into the disastrous war of 1870! The 1860’s decade in France was a period of dissonance, which the twenty-one year old Paul Cezanne and his close friend Emile Zola felt acutely: they were at once exhilarated because the old dogmatic ways seemed to be collapsing, but troubled because they did not know the shape of the future. Zola wrote admiringly of the artist Manet, who shocked the art world in the 1860’s: “he could see with his own eyes, in each of his canvases he could give us a translation of nature in that original language that he found deep within himself”. Cezanne intuited that he had to go back in order to move forward: or rather, that he had to go deeper and trust that his intuition would move beyond the old formulas, and open up new horizons.
The mind must set itself up wherever it goes
And it would be most convenient to impose
Its old rooms –
Just tack them up like an interior tent.
Uh oh!
But the new holes aren’t
Where the windows went!
Kay Ryan