Cezanne

I was looking at a book of Cezanne reproductions and was struck by a certain painting.

A portrait of a priest, done in muddy shadowish colours, an earthy palette. A gloomy-looking, darkish man, but looking also determined, in fact more like a crusader. The thing that stuck in my mind was his pure white cercingle and on his breast an absolutely blood red cross, painted a very fresh and solid red. I also liked his mephistophelian pictures, a meurtre here, a viol there, all under dark and rolling clouds.

Now Cezanne was a determined man if nothing else, a man who valued sincerity in painting but who also had a healthy dose of old classical aesthetic sensibilities. He lived in the country and was apparently of independent means, had a wife, cared not much about Paris and the fashionable world, was basically a bourgeois. Toiled away in obscurity.

How many hours did he stand before that Mont St. Victoire, squinting, making adjustments, straining, determined to push through, to render the rocks and the trees solidly and harmonically.

Off he trundles home with his easel on his back, no doubt in a peasanty smock. Full bountiful beard, thinning hair, tendency to impatience or irascibility. Didn't suffer fools gladly. Off to paint his fleurs et fruits.

When a kid he swam in rivers on vacation from the lycee, his head fulla Greek. And he said his favourite smell was "the smell of the fields".