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Lot Essay
Cezanne’s Mur de jardin depicts a path in the countryside, reminiscent of the artist’s native Aix-en-Provence. The path is bordered by a stone garden wall, above which the thick tufts of dark green foliage are visible. The sole occupant of the path is a man wearing a simple white shirt and black trousers and hat; he looks down as he walks, as if contemplating his own shadow, cast by the blazing afternoon sun. Cezanne provides his viewers with additional suggestions of wild, picturesque beauty: a cluster of red and blue flowers in the foreground, a glimpse of a meadow and the edge of a wood beyond that. Overall, this quiet scene is one of humble rural poetry.
Mur de jardin is defined by its thick, creamy brushstrokes, as well as the radical flatness and opacity of its composition. The titular wall is the blank, planar surface, which emphasizes of the flatness of the canvas itself as a two-dimensional object. This garden wall is also a visual obstacle, which prevents the viewer’s ability to imaginatively enter the landscape. These formal qualities of Mur de jardin suggest the influence of the Realist painter Edouard Manet, whose own thickly-painted canvases caused a sensation at the official Salon exhibitions in Paris throughout the 1860s. Manet similarly used flat architectural devices—walls, balconies, mirrors—to rhyme with the two-dimensionality of the painting. This compositional strategy also served to isolate his figurative protagonists and to heighten the intensity of their psychological states.
The present work first belonged to Emile Zola, the famed nineteenth-century writer and a passionate defender of Manet. Zola was one of the Cezanne’s closest childhood friends; as Alex Danchev wrote, “Cezanne’s relationship with Zola was the main axis of his emotional life from cradle to grave” (Cezanne: A Life, New York, 2012, p. 28). As school boys in Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne and Zola roamed the countryside, swimming in rivers and wandering the woods. As young men, they both moved to Paris to pursue their respective arts—but while Zola took to the capital city quickly, Cezanne struggled with homesickness and perennial doubt about his painting skill. Their relationship fractured irrevocably with the publication of Zola’s novel, L’Oeuvre, in 1886. Cezanne believed that the story of the main character—an avant-garde painter who fails to live up to his own potential and spirals into madness—was a fictionalized account of his own life. Despite this rupture, the present painting remained in Zola’s collection until his death in 1902 and was sold in his estate sale the following year. The work was there acquired by the famed art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who staged the first major retrospective of Cezanne’s work in 1895 and whose portrait Cezanne painted in 1899 (Petit Palais, Paris). Mur de jardin was purchased by Helen and Murray Snell Danforth in 1943 and has remained in their family for eighty years.
Mur de jardin is defined by its thick, creamy brushstrokes, as well as the radical flatness and opacity of its composition. The titular wall is the blank, planar surface, which emphasizes of the flatness of the canvas itself as a two-dimensional object. This garden wall is also a visual obstacle, which prevents the viewer’s ability to imaginatively enter the landscape. These formal qualities of Mur de jardin suggest the influence of the Realist painter Edouard Manet, whose own thickly-painted canvases caused a sensation at the official Salon exhibitions in Paris throughout the 1860s. Manet similarly used flat architectural devices—walls, balconies, mirrors—to rhyme with the two-dimensionality of the painting. This compositional strategy also served to isolate his figurative protagonists and to heighten the intensity of their psychological states.
The present work first belonged to Emile Zola, the famed nineteenth-century writer and a passionate defender of Manet. Zola was one of the Cezanne’s closest childhood friends; as Alex Danchev wrote, “Cezanne’s relationship with Zola was the main axis of his emotional life from cradle to grave” (Cezanne: A Life, New York, 2012, p. 28). As school boys in Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne and Zola roamed the countryside, swimming in rivers and wandering the woods. As young men, they both moved to Paris to pursue their respective arts—but while Zola took to the capital city quickly, Cezanne struggled with homesickness and perennial doubt about his painting skill. Their relationship fractured irrevocably with the publication of Zola’s novel, L’Oeuvre, in 1886. Cezanne believed that the story of the main character—an avant-garde painter who fails to live up to his own potential and spirals into madness—was a fictionalized account of his own life. Despite this rupture, the present painting remained in Zola’s collection until his death in 1902 and was sold in his estate sale the following year. The work was there acquired by the famed art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who staged the first major retrospective of Cezanne’s work in 1895 and whose portrait Cezanne painted in 1899 (Petit Palais, Paris). Mur de jardin was purchased by Helen and Murray Snell Danforth in 1943 and has remained in their family for eighty years.