In Banks of the Marne by the French artist Paul Cézanne, a solitary chateau peeks out from the dense foliage with its tower and spire, whitewashed walls, and wooden balcony. Several years earlier the painter had composed a similar canvas in the form of Zola’s House at Médan, which currently resides with the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.
Otherwise known as Le Château de Médan, the canvas was completed sometime between 1879 and 1881 after Cézanne paid a visit to the home of his childhood friend Émile Zola. In contrast to Banks of the Marne, which dates to 1888, Zola’s House at Médan appears busier and livelier, with freer brushstrokes in the reflections, ascending trees, and a dazzling array of yellow and ochre. Its stack of houses seem inviting rather than shaded and monolithic.
The village of Médan lies along the Seine to the northwest of Paris, whereas the Marne serves as a southeastern tributary of the river. Zola bought the house in 1878 after the success of his novel L’Assommoir, over the course of the next three years transforming his ‘rabbit hutch’ into an extensive manor. In Zola’s House at Médan, the chateau lies to the far right of the canvas with its gray-blue roof, three chimneys, and red window shutters. One of the earliest visitors to the house in 1879, Cézanne borrowed Zola’s rowing boat Nana and began the painting mid-river.
In his monograph Cézanne, first published in 1999 by Taschen, the art historian Hajo Düchting sought to contextualise and draw out the life of the famously taciturn artist. Sometimes tending towards psychological evaluation, Düchting discusses Zola’s House at Médan at length, including a quotation on the composition of the work by Cézanne’s Post-Impressionist contemporary Paul Gauguin.
Gauguin is recorded as the first owner of the painting, having purchased it from the Parisian paint grinder and art dealer Julien François Tanguy. Often accepting art works in exchange for paints and other supplies where money was tight, Tanguy gathered a fine collection of Impressionist paintings in his small shop on Montmartre.
Called Père by his artists, he sold or attempted to sell pieces by Monet, Sisley, Seurat, and Van Gogh alongside Cézanne and Gauguin. Van Gogh painted him three times, with the latter two canvases some of the most stylised works in his entire oeuvre for their flat patterns and decorative wallpapers as the artist experimented with the nascent trend for Japonisme.
The quote by Gauguin provides us with his own sense of the interplay between forms and colours in Cézanne’s painting. It continues to provide an account of an incident which took place while Cézanne was mid-paint. Humorous for its depiction of the professorial passerby, it also provides us with a sense of Cezánne’s character while suggesting something of the contemporary response to the artist’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 conveys 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 paint 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.”
