River Bend (Coin de Riviere)

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. River Bend exhibits several characteristic elements of this early period of searching and experimentation. In subject it reflects the Realist dictum that any random slice of landscape is worthy of depiction. Moreover, its dark tonality recalls the woodland scenes of Courbet, the most outspoken proponent of the Realist movement. But Cézanne’s interpretation of the motif is actually closer to that of the Romantics. It is the temperament of the artist, his mood and emotional state, that predominates. This quality is transmitted through the nervous brushwork, most especially in the tree to the right, which is executed in twisted, almost frantic strokes.The green, black, blue, and white palette employed here is typical of Cézanne’s early landscapes. To achieve dramatic contrasts, he juxtaposes the light tones of the sky with the sharp diagonal of the dark hillside and its foliage. A patch of red-orange dominates the center of the work and is reflected in the water. The entire canvas is painted in impasto, with strokes in divergent directions that frequently overlap. This tends to give the land a fluid aspect, mitigated only by the density of the paint. 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.”