Rocks, L'Estaque

Because Paul Cézanne was virtually self-taught, his early work evinces a less predictable path of development than that of artists schooled in the academic tradition. An extreme individualist, ever fearful of coming under the influence of others, he doggedly looked and learned on his own. From 1864 to 1870, Cézanne continually moved between Paris and his native Aix-en-Provence. While in Paris he enrolled at the Académie Suisse, where he could draw from live models, and also devoted a great deal of time to studying painting in the Louvre. His restless spirit and persistent quest for a personal style are often apparent in the works of this time. Though a contemporary of the artists soon to be known as Impressionists, whom he met at the Académie Suisse and the Café Guérbois, he stubbornly pursued a very different course. Painted in the same year as River Bend, and for many years owned by the same collectors, Rocks, L’Estaque is similar in palette and in its strong light and dark contrasts. The general tenor, however, is more serene. This has to do in part with the composition, which is based on receding triangles of rocks, sea, hill, and sky. Another stabilizing factor is the brushwork, which is more even than that of River Bend. Here, the relatively thick paint tends to have been applied in rhythmically repetitious strokes, although the direction differs from section to section. The building up of a painted structure through the use of uniform, parallel strokes was a method that Cézanne would develop and perfect in his mature work. The small scale and spontaneous application of paint in this work suggests that it was done out of doors. About this time Cézanne’s ideas about the importance of working in the open air began to crystallize. “But you know,” he wrote in a letter to his boyhood friend, the writer and critic Emile Zola, “all pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as the things done outside.”