Zola’s House at Médan (or Le Château de Médan), by Cézanne

In a piece on Cézanne’s Banks of the Marne, published on this site several weeks ago, I mentioned and briefly considered, by way of comparison, the painting Zola’s House at Médan. The painting is just as often referred to as Le Château de Médan; it was painted between 1879 and 1881; and is now part of the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

Over the last week I have been reading through a book on Cézanne by Hajo Düchting, published by Taschen, entitled on the front cover simply Cézanne; with the title page expanding upon this via the provision of a subtitle, 1839-1906, Nature into Art. The book makes particular mention of Zola’s House at Médan; and includes a lengthy quotation by Gauguin which I thought was worth republishing here.

Gauguin is recorded as the painting’s first owner, purchasing it from the Parisian art supplier and art dealer Julien François Tanguy. Over the course of years, Tanguy established in his shop quite a collection of Impressionist paintings, owing to the fact that, where money was lacking, he accepted paintings in exchange for paints. He was called Père by his artists, and sold, or attempted to sell, works by Monet, Sisley, Seurat and Van Gogh alongside Cézanne and Gauguin. Van Gogh painted him three times, the latter two paintings increasingly experimental, Japanese-inspired portraits.

Gauguin’s remarks provide us with his own sense of the interplay of colours in Cézanne’s painting. They continue with a second-hand account of an occurrence which took place with Cézanne mid-paint. This account is humorous in its evocation of the professorial passer-by, it provides a nice depiction of Cézanne’s character, and it is also a suggestive shot of a perhaps not atypical contemporary response to Cézanne’s work. Here is Gauguin:

Cézanne is painting a shimmering landscape against an ultramarine background, with intense shades of green and ochre gleaming like silk. The trees are stood in a row like tin soldiers, and through the tangle of branches you can make out his friend Zola’s house. Thanks to the yellow reflections on the whitewashed walls, the vermilion window shutters take on an orange tone. A crisp Veronese green convey the sumptuous leafage in the garden, and the sobre, contrasting shade of bluish nettles in the foreground renders the simple poem even more sonorous.

A presumptuous passer-by takes a shocked glance at what seems, in his eyes, to be a dilettante’s wretched daubing, and asks Cézanne in a professorial voice, with a smile,

‘Trying your hand at painting?’

‘Yes – but I’m no expert!’

‘I can see that. Look here, I was once a pupil of Corot. If you don’t mind, I’ll just add a few well-placed strokes and set the whole thing right. What count are the valeurs, and the valeurs alone.’

And sure enough, the vandal adds a few strokes of paint to the shimmering picture, utterly unabashed. The oriental silk of this symphony of colour is smothered in dirty greys. Cézanne exclaims: ‘Monsieur, you have an enviable talent. No doubt when you plant a portrait you put shiny highlights on the tip of the nose just as you would on the bars of a chair.’

Cézanne picks up his palette once more and scratches off the mess he has made. Silence reigns for a moment. Then Cézanne lets fly a tremendous fart, and, gazing evenly at the man, declares: ‘That’s better.’

Banks of the Marne, by Cézanne

The Hermitage Amsterdam is currently home to two complementary exhibitions. The first, Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration, with a tagline explaining that the works on display are ‘Highlights from the Hermitage’, endeavours to place the Impressionists within their French Nineteenth Century context. It shows Neoclassicists Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, the Romanticism of Delacroix – who Van Gogh regarded as the supreme colourist, and about whom he wrote in September, 1888,

‘Now, it is true that I see in impressionism a resurrection of Eugène Delacroix, but as the interpretations are both divergent and also rather irreconcilable, impressionism cannot yet formulate a doctrine. That is why I am staying with the impressionists, because it means nothing, and commits you to nothing, and as one of them I do not have to take up any position.’

– and intermediaries, including Charles-François Daubigny and Carolus-Duran, alongside Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley and Renoir.

The second exhibition, entitled simply Vincent, with the subtitle ‘The Van Gogh Museum at the Hermitage’, shows a selection from the Van Gogh Museum’s collection whilst that museum is undergoing refurbishment in order to meet updated Dutch safety and security regulations. The exhibition is organised thematically rather than chronologically, the seven themes comprising, in order, ‘Practice makes perfect’, ‘A style of his own’, ‘The effect of colour’, ‘Peasant painter’, ‘Looking to Japan’, ‘The modern portrait’, and ‘The wealth of nature’. Whilst some of the earlier themes in particular are conceptually slight, the exhibition itself is coherent and succeeds in providing novel points of connection. Impressionism is open until January 27; whereas Vincent will run until the end of April, when the Van Gogh Museum will reopen with a major exhibition celebrating the museum’s fortieth anniversary, to be called Van Gogh at Work.

I visited Impressionism last weekend, and especially admired a painting by Cézanne, Banks of the Marne (1888). Cézanne achieves in this painting one of the purest and most convincing depictions of water I’ve seen; and he does this by largely replicating the river bank in the water below, presenting a reflection that is almost a mirror image. The trees and the residence on land appear reflected at the same angle, and with the same dimensions. Cézanne’s palette – with its predominant blue-greens offset by the white villa and its ochre roof and balcony – also remains constant, with the darker tones in the water serving to differentiate and providing a sense of depth. Whilst there is nothing amounting to a rippled brushstroke, the short and dense diagonals which give the trees their matter are replaced in Cézanne’s water by looser horizontals.

Around 1888 when Cézanne painted Banks of the Marne, he also worked on a number of other water paintings, experimenting with different ways of representing, different ways of bringing his canvases together. Bridge over the Marne at Créteil, with its view looking down the river, features geometric curves and larger blocks of colour as trees, reflected in the water with vertical rather than horizontal brushwork. From the same period, the more abstract Bridge over a Pool consists of a mass of vivid green diagonals which encroach upon and enclose the bridge, the water only delineated by some darker tones and shadows; and Aqueduct and Lock repeats Banks of the Marne‘s trick, the aqueduct immediately mirrored in the water below, here slightly extended and outlined, with unfastened foliage hovering above on each side.

Banks of the Marne recalls an earlier work, Zola’s House at Médan (or Le Château de Médan), which Cézanne completed between 1879 and 1881, Zola having bought the house in 1878. The painting depicts the banks of the Seine – of which the Marne is a tributary, running southeast from Paris – in an unusually rigid and symmetrical fashion: whereas Banks of the Marne is broadly split into river bank and river, here the canvas is divided into the five horizontal sections of river, river bank, houses, hills and sky, with tall trees rising vertically at regular intervals between the houses. Cézanne’s palette is much brighter, the sensation sunnier, with intense yellows, greens and ochres and a bold blue sky. Still, both paintings confront the viewer in a similar way: we look directly across a stretch of water towards a river bank, densely leafy, something solidly constructed and impenetrable. Like in the later painting, so here Cézanne indicates those reflections in the water through more loosely painted, horizontal brushstrokes.

De Leeuw, R. (ed.) The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, trans. A. Pomerans (Penguin, 1997)