Vermilion, or why Cézanne took the shine off things. Issue 1 (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Smith, Paul
• Is Part Of: Word & image. Volume 36:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 64
• Page End: 79
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: vermilion -- Edmond and Jules de Goncourt -- Marius Roux -- ton -- harmony -- modelling -- Roger de Piles -- Michel-François Dandré-Bardon -- Julien de la Rochenoire; Arts -- Periodicals; Communication in art -- Periodicals; 700.5
• DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2019.1652010
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0266-6286

Abstract

Abstract: This article argues that, in the early 1870s, Paul Cézanne began to make colours (including vermilion) his medium, whereas previously he had tended to treat them as inert materials, which he needed to force for effect. One factor in Cézanne's change of heart was his receptiveness to the theme developed in the novels Manette Salomon (1867), by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and La Proie et l'ombre (1876), by Marius Roux, that failing to relate responsively to his medium can have catastrophic consequences for the painter. Another was Cézanne's espousal of Camille Pissarro's practice in the early 1870s of using ton to create 'harmony' for the express purpose of 'modelling'. The relationship between Cézanne's ideas about ton and three theoretical sources are then examined. Two are much earlier: Roger de Piles's writings about colour harmony and its spatial effects; and the treatise Michel-François Dandré-Bardon wrote in the eighteenth century that applied de Piles's ideas to ton . The other is the series of manuals the animal painter, Julien de la Rochenoire, published in the 1850s, which maintain that 'relations' between tons were crucial to 'modelling'. How Cézanne used tons is then analysed in the painting Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (1877) (now in Boston). It is shown that colour relationships are more numerous and more finely integrated in this work than in its sister painting (in Stockholm), with the result that its harmony is especially tightly knit. This, it is maintained, allows it to model-shape at the same time as bestowing cohesion to the depicted scene. The article ends by considering how, unlike the de Goncourts' Naz Coriolis or Claude Monet, who pushed painting to its limits in an attempt to capture the effects of shine and sparkle, Cézanne opted to play them down in order to give solidity to the world depicted in his paintings.