Paul Cezanne - The Battle of Love [c.1880]

Paul Cezanne - The Battle of Love [c.1880], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm]

Paul Cezanne - The Artist’s Son [1885-90]

Paul Cezanne - The Artist’s Son [1885-90], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 65.3 x 54 cm]

Paul Cezanne - The Large Bathers [c.1906]

Paul Cezanne - The Large Bathers [c.1906], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Near the end of his life Paul Cézanne painted three large canvases of female nudes disporting in a landscape. They derive in part from pastoral images of female bathers, such as the goddess Diana and her maidens, long favoured in French art. These works seem to have been, for Cézanne, the culmination of a lifetime of exploration on the nude, his final testament within the grand tradition of French narrative painting on the nature of the human condition. They differ greatly from one another, these three paintings (the others are in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania, and the National Gallery, London). The Philadelphia version, perhaps because of its unfinished state, is both the most exalted and the most serene. The women command a great stage, very much like goddesses in some grand opera production, with the arched trees acting as the proscenium. They are completely at ease, and for all the motion and activity there is a profound sense of eternal calm and resolution, as well as a quality of monumentality achieved through the most lucid and unlaboured means.

Paul Cézanne - The Avenue at the Jas de Bouffan [1874-75]

Paul Cézanne - The Avenue at the Jas de Bouffan [1874-75], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The Jas de Bouffan was an estate on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence with a fine house dating from the seventeenth century. It belonged to Cézanne's family. Its avenue of chestnut trees provided the motif for a series of pictures by Cézanne, of which this is the earliest. Although difficult to date, it seems likely that it was painted after Cézanne's Impressionist phase. The construction of the picture, with its compressed space, heavy forms and slab-like diagonal foliage (made using a palette knife) is complex. It marks the first appearance of various elements that were to characterise many of his later, classically designed landscapes.

[Oil on canvas, 38.1 x 46 cm]

Paul Cézanne - Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants [1890-94]

Paul Cézanne - Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants [1890-94], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

[Oil on canvas, 72 x 91 cm]

Paul Cezanne - The Card Players

The Card Players - Paul Cezanne, originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Paul Cezanne - The Temptation of Saint Anthony [c.1870]

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.

Paul Cezanne - Self Portrait [c.1878-80]

Paul Cézanne (January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.

Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields; at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

[Oil on canvas]