475
PARTISAN REVIEW
and in composing his works themselves. Each of the paintings calls
forth in the viewer a pace and attitude somehow analogous to
Cezanne's own. How it wishes to be seen is among the most
important characteristics of each work. Each is comprehended by
the viewer not all at once but gradually, so that the slow working
out of what is happening within the painting is punctuated by
sudden realizations of nuances of color and correspondences
among objects which had not been noticed at first. Works like
these tell how ordinary objects belonging to familiar scenes can
become the recipients of a searching and orderly type of looking,
yet one that does not restrict the viewer's mind from going where it
will go. By such processes, the depth of meaning of the works
comes to be seen as fully allied with the slowly ripened effort
through which each had come into being.
Cezanne had long and significant relationships with his
mother and son, his father, his sisters, and his wife. He painted
more than forty paintings in which his wife appears among these
being some of his greatest works. He made numerous drawings of
her and an even greater number of his son. Others of his portraits
depict his friends: Zola, Valabregue, Boyer, Peyron, Chocquet.
Throughout his life, one of the chief ways he expressed affection
for a person was to make a painting of them. In the portraits of
Chocquet, for example, his respect, admiration, and appreciation
for this man are apparent even in how he positioned Chocquet's
image on the canvas and built up the forms that describe him. In
contrast, Cezanne made few portraits of persons unimportant to
him.
His feeling for the religion of his family went deep. He told
his niece,
"If
I did not believe in God, I would not be able to
paint." From past art and poetry, he certainly would have been
familiar with the phenomena of artistic inspiration. The testimony
of Leo Larguier and others suggests that the painter felt there was
a connection between his religion and his creativity, although it is
not clear to what degree he had perceived this connection earlier
in his life.
Personally and artistically, he was attracted to Provence,
where he spent most of his life. In 1896 during a rare visit else–
where in France, he wrote in a letter of "our old native soil, so
vi–
brant, so harsh, and so reverberant with light." Two days later:
"Where you've been born there that's it-nothing else can com-
