Paul Cézanne by Jon Kear

Author:Jon Kear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Le Château de Médan, 1880, oil on canvas.

Cézanne felt deeply hurt by how remote their friendship had become by this time. He wrote to Zola on several occasions asking to visit, only to be put off with thinly veiled excuses. Cézanne still had few admirers, while Zola’s recognition as one of France’s leading novelists and commercial success continued to grow. This had driven a wedge between them. They now occupied very different spaces. Zola moved in vaunted, haute-bourgeois social circles, while Cézanne was increasingly isolated. By this time, even the notoriety he had enjoyed in Paris was a fading memory. Zola’s correspondence with Cézanne, by turns irritable and condescending, though punctuated by occasional moments of remorse, indicates how much their relationship had declined. In a series of letters over the course of 1878, Cézanne sought to placate his friend and find common artistic ground. In several rather tentative letters he praised Une Page d’amour (A Love Episode), the eighth novel of Zola’s epic twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, which Zola had recently published.

Anything I say to you about it [Une Page d’amour] is . . . only to give you an idea of what I can grasp of the work. It seems to me a picture that’s painted more delicately than the previous one [L’Assommoir], but the temperament or creative force is still the same . . . the build-up of the hero’s passion is very carefully done. Another observation I have . . . is that the settings are done in such a way as to become imbued with the same passion as drives the characters, forming an integral whole. They seem to come alive . . . and to share in the sufferings of living beings.45

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