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Perennial Cézanne

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 20th August 2008

Andrew Lambirth on the artist’s profound and far-reaching influence

The Courtauld has the finest holding of works by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) in this country, and is currently showing the whole collection together for the first time. Samuel Courtauld bought his Cézannes between 1923 and 1929, which was perspicacious, as the artist was then still very much out of favour. The first work he bought was ‘Still Life with Plaster Cupid’ (c.1894), and he followed this up with purchases of more pictures he really loved, including watercolours such as the magnificent ’Apples, Bottles and Chairback’. In 1978, the Courtauld’s Cézanne holding was further augmented by the Princes Gate Bequest, from the collection of Count Antoine Seilern, which brought ‘Turning Road’ (c.1904), a large late landscape, radical in its approaching abstraction, to join the others. The pencil portrait of Hortense Fiquet (whom Cézanne married in 1886) and the two graphite and watercolour studies ‘Armchair‘ and ‘Statue under Trees’ were also part of the gift. Together with a couple of later acquisitions and a painting on long loan, this makes up the 20 glowing exhibits in this display.

In the middle of the exhibition room is a flat display case containing Cézanne’s nine letters to Emile Bernard, stressing the importance of study from nature. However architectural or abstract Cézanne became, he was always scrupulous in insisting on the centrality of working from the motif. His celebrated unwillingness or inability to paint from memory was perhaps in part due to his realisation that to make great paintings he had to subdue his romantic, almost baroque, imagination. And one way of doing this was by scrutinising and recording the visual facts of a subject. It was perhaps easier to do this at first with still-life, for the simple reason that the objects keep relatively still. As a consequence, landscape doesn’t really feature in the mature Cézanne’s work until the 1870s.