Cézanne. Nathalia Brodskaya

had no use for thoughts on art expressed by any other means except “with brush in hand.”

      Portrait of Anthony Valabrègue

      1869–1871

      Oil on canvas, 60.4 × 50.2 cm

      J. P. Getty Museum, Malibu

      His pronouncements bear the stamp not so much of theoretical postulates as of practical advice to fellow artists. It is not therefore to the artist’s theoretical statements but to his works that we must look for an explanation of how his creative method gradually came into its own, how the links of the whole chain which today we justly call “Cézanne’s artistic system” were forged.

      Pastoral

      1870

      Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm

      Musée d’Orsay, Paris

      In April 1861, the 22-year-old Paul Cézanne, son of a wealthy banker in Aix-en-Provence, arrived in Paris. His aim, his passion, his most fervent wish was to devote himself body and soul to art. Behind him was a solid classical education received in the college of Aix, rather modest successes (according to his teachers) at the local school of drawing and, above all, years of rapturous absorption of the unrestrained romanticism of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Charles Baudelaire, years of youthful dreaming, together with Émile Zola, of the lofty calling of the artist and of their future collaboration in the field of art.