Details

Object type

painting

Title

The Star Ridge with the Kings Peak

Artist/Maker

Paul Cézanne

Culture/School

French

Date

1878 - 1879

Materials

oil on canvas

Dimensions

unframed: 492 x 590 mm; framed: 725 x 825 mm

Description

Cézanne’s early paintings, romantic or violent subjects drawn from his imagination, were dark, brooding and tortured. It was only after 1872 that, encouraged by Pissarro, he learned to draw his inspiration from nature and began to paint outside using the lighter palette and broken brushstroke of the Impressionists. Cézanne, however, never shared the Impressionists’ interest in capturing the fleeting and transient. He was more encouraged to seek out the inherent structure in a landscape and paint it in a way that was true to his sensations in front of nature.

This landscape shows a view of the range of mountains, La Chaîne de l'Etoile, just to the south of Aix-en-Provence, the city in the south of France where Cézanne lived and worked. Like many of Cézanne’s paintings this work has not been finished. Indeed, Cézanne seems to have felt that the painting was a failure. While the band of houses, buildings and hills in the middle ground have been worked on over a number of sessions, the area of grass in the foreground, the distant mountain range and the broad expanse of sky have been thinly painted. The artist has clearly abandoned the painting and, no doubt to signal his dissatisfaction, seems to have slashed the area of sky above the houses on the right where the repairs to a long vertical tear can be seen.

The fact that this painting is unfinished allows us a fascinating glimpse into Cézanne’s working method. During the later 1870s he explored the possibility of combining colour and form using brushwork. Here, particularly in the buildings and trees, he uses regular square strokes that would become the constructive brushstroke that he employed throughout the 1880s. Notice, for example, the simple squares and rectangles of pale blue that are used to indicate the doors and windows that pierce the walls of the buildings. Although Cézanne had difficulties ‘realising’ his creative intentions and chose to abandon this painting rather than struggle further, we can still enjoy the rich colour harmony he has established, where he has played the warm oranges of the buildings and strips of earth against the deep , dark greens of the fields and near hills. As we see often in Cézanne, strokes of colour from one area of the canvas find a place elsewhere, enlivening and animating the whole surface.

Why should Cézanne abandon this work? It was painted during a stay in the south of France that lasted from early 1878 until March 1879. He may have been unhappy with the work, but perhaps on his return from Paris in November1881, he simply never had sufficient time to finish it. Perhaps, in the meantime, he had found new challenges to tackle. The painting was purchased in Paris by the Glasgow dealer A. J. McNeill Reid who recorded that ‘Evidently Cézanne was not quite satisfied with the Garganne since, when we bought it from Vollard, the famous French dealer, the sky had been slashed by the artist, a thing Cézanne was wont to do if something did not come just as he wanted it to do. It was eventually most skilfully restored by Helmut Ruhemann and it would take an expert eye to find out where the damage had been.’ As the eminent Cézanne scholar Jon Rewald noted, what is interesting about this is that Cézanne’s dealer ‘apparently preferred to sell a painting in the condition in which he had obtained it from the artist or, as, doubtless, in this case, from his heirs, rather than repair it.’

Credit Line/Donor

Gifted by Jessie McInnes, 1951

ID Number

2932

Location

Kelvingrove French Art Gallery