Out of Darkness, into Light
Looking at Paul Cézanne’s early paintings in the hope of glimpsing the first glimmers of his hugely influential later style.
French painter Paul Cézanne has often been called “the father of modern painting”. It’s his mid-career landscapes of Aix-en-Provence, and late-career still life paintings, that are most noteworthy and have the clearest influence in terms of broader art history. Though, we can gain insight into the development of his ideas by looking at some of his earlier, lesser known works. Before moving toward landscape and still life, he produced illustrative pictures often with heavy figures painted with an almost sculptural approach to the laying-on of paint.
Skull and Candlestick (1866) has a dark, Gothic-Romantic feel created by a very sombre palette and ‘heavy’ strokes of paint applied with a palette knife… and, of course, the choice of subject!
The decaying flesh of the fruit and drying flowers, in juxtaposition to the book, evoke the dark, decadent poems of Charles Baudelaire and Gerard Nerval. Once in this frame of mind, the viewer notices the candle stub atop the holder that almost reaches the top of the canvas. It is the last inch of an unlighted candle, and when it is ever re-lit, it would have but a short time before it finally burns out… and…
