La Conversation

Painted circa 1870-1871, the enigmatic La Conversation is a rare and highly important work from Paul Cezanne’s early career, which reveals the multiple influences that were shaping the artist’s bourgeoning style at a pivotal moment in his creative development. Depicting an apparently genteel scene, in which two fashionably-attired women enjoy an outing in a well-maintained park, the picture is laced with undercurrents of intrigue and mystery. Cezanne’s inspiration for the painting came not from life or a casually observed scene he had encountered, but rather from the popular, mass-media of his day—La Conversation is one of three known paintings by the artist from this period to derive directly from illustrated fashion plates, alongside Femmes et fillette dans un intérieur (FWN, no. 606; Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow) and La Promenade (FWN, no. 608; Private collection).
Common to women’s magazines of the time, these popular illustrations described the latest styles in Parisian fashion through a standardized pictorial vocabulary, in which small groups of elegantly dressed figures are seen conversing, promenading or “taking the air” in cultivated gardens and parks. The origins of La Conversation lay in the pages of one of the leading fashion journals of the day, La Mode illustrée, a periodical subscribed to by Cezanne’s two sisters, and one of the only publications to continue printing through the Franco-Prussian War which was raging through the fall and winter of 1870-1871. In response to the conflict, La Mode illustrée had begun to promote a much more modest and plainer style of dress, compared to the extravagant gowns and accessories it had advertised early in the summer. The beginnings of this shift in approach can be seen in the source imagery for La Conversation, which appeared in the publication just twelve days after the declaration of war.
While the rapidly changing styles of fashion had captured the imagination of many Impressionist artists through the 1860s, for Cezanne the growing size of a bustle or fall of a sleeve in a jacket represented more than just a glimpse in to the everchanging modern experience—these illustrations offered an invaluable insight into contemporary bourgeois culture, the tastes and opinions of society at large, and the social mores that governed and controlled human behavior. In La Conversation, Cezanne adapts and amends the fanciful imagery of the original fashion plate, to create a more complex scene. The two women appear distinctly melancholy, lost in their own thoughts rather than engaged in light conversation, while to the right of the composition Cezanne has added two soberly dressed men gazing away towards the middle distance, leading the eye towards the French flag fluttering in the breeze atop a cupola. There is a new sense of gravity within the scene when compared with the effervescent fashion plate, which perhaps hints towards the turbulent times in which it was created.
Expanding the narrative of the painting to suggest a partie de campagne, these additional figures introduce not just the idea of flirtation and an elemental male/female divide, but also a certain eroticism and intrigue. The relationship between the four characters remains elusive, their proximity suggesting a connection, but the nature of which remains ultimately unclear. As André Dombrowski has pointed out, this addition heightens the erotic undertone of the work: “Removed from the exclusively female realm of fashion, the transformed print evokes urban images of not so genteel flirtation” (in op. cit., September 2006, p. 590). Through these allusions and suggestive details, Cezanne recasts the familiar, benign imagery of the fashion plate into a more suspense-filled scene, foregrounding the drama, tension and hidden passions that often lay behind polite appearances.