One of the preconditions of Cézanne’s greatness is his constant readiness to change. In this sense The Temptation of St. Anthony, a very strange work in itself, is highly typical of Cézanne. The painter, around thirty years old, fated for a business career by his ambitious father, is still a youthful tyro. Without any real academic training, which he had not obtained in the Académie Suisse in Paris, he relies on finding models among the old masters.
Creative restlessness drives him in this picture to flightiness, his Provençal preference for the Baroque to stilted poses and theatrical gestures. The female nudes with their uncouth limbs appear bloated; drapery frames them like rococo shells. In front of this turbulent appearance of the four temptresses is St. Anthony, bearing the features of the young Cézanne, retreated into the left background, without the artist’s having succeeded in making it clear in terms of perspective. Cézanne’s rough brushwork, called by the artist himself his "manière couillarde", "slinging style", renounces all differentiation and slaps down the chalky white figures directly on to the dark background.
Cézanne was occupied with the theme of the temptation of St. Anthony several times in the 1870s. The crouching nude in the foreground with her hair falling behind becomes a richly varied component of his "Bathers" down to the great compositions done at the end of his life.
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