BOB KIRSCH
476
pare." In the landscapes of the 1870s, for example, lies evidence of
what Rewald calls "a virtual rediscovery of Provence." As he
grew older: "... his world became ever more restricted ... .Rather
than venture farther away from Aix, [he] actually confined
himself still more to its immediate surroundings....He remained
a loner in the midst of a region where every stone, every tree,
every brook was familiar to him since his youth. "Cezanne wrote,
"Here on the river bank, there are so many motifs, the same sub–
ject seen from another angle offers a subject of the most com–
pelling interest, and so varied that I believe I could work away for
months without changing position but just by leaning a little to
the right and then a little to the left."
Accompanying his feeling for the land was an alliance he
had formed with the sunshine that was so characteristic of it. His
letters confirm that there was a personal basis for his artistic use
of sunlight: a couplet in the first of his letters preserved, "Phoebus
traversing his brilliant path/ Sheds floods of his light all over
Aix"; an 1866 report that he got somewhat depressed "every
evening when the sun sets and then it rains"; and a remark of
1896, "The sun is shining and the heart is full of hope. I shall
soon be back at work." Compared with most of what is depicted in
his paintings, the sunlight is more free, unbounded, undisci–
plined, continuous, pervasive. It resembles somewhat the
painter's own perceptiveness, his consciousness, his conscien–
tiousness. It is also like the artist in bringing something positive to
all that is represented in the scene as well as to every particle of
paint surface. What sunlight became for Cezanne was, of course,
tied to what he knew it had been for certain painters and writers
past and present. When in
House Behind Trees on the Road to
Tholonet,
c. 1885-86, he develops the contrast of middleground
sunlight and nearer shadows, and thus brings drama into this
quiet work unencumbered by dark or oppressive undertones; or
when in
Arbres et Maisons au Bord de l'Eau,
c. 1892-93, the light
bounding off the houses and contrasting with the reflected light
of the foliage generates an effect within which human feeling
finds something akin to itself; or when in numerous Bathers
compositions, he softly binds together the open and relaxing fig–
ures through the operation of the nuanced, optimistic sunlight–
he shows his feeling for such a fundamental natural element as
sunlight.
