Fig. 1 Paul Cézanne Small Houses at Auvers-sur-Oise 1873-1874
What did Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) try to realize in his paintings?
The above question has many possible answers. However, one perspective that has yet to be explored is the transformation of visual perception engendered by the introduction of the railway in the 19th century.
In fact, Cézanne witnessed the development of the French railway.
In 1837, a passenger railway was introduced in France; Cézanne was born two years later. Railways developed rapidly in the 1840s, and all the main railway lines that now connect Paris to France’s major cities were constructed during the Second French Empire (1852-1870).
In 1861, when Cézanne was 22 years old, he took a long-distance train trip for the first time; it was his first journey to Paris from his hometown, Aix-en-Provence. Thereafter, Cézanne frequently traveled to various areas of France using the railway network. Cézanne is generally known as a painter who loved nature, but he was also a painter of modern life.
Depending on the power and stamina of the horses, the speed of the horse-drawn carriage was usually only approximately 16 kilometers per hour. The maximum speed of the steam locomotives operating in 1845 was about 64 kilometers per hour, that is, quadruple the speed of the carriage.
Looking through the windows of the train, the high speed produced fleeting images of scenery which were disliked by the older generation, who were accustomed to detailed appreciation of scenery. However, the younger generations soon got used to admiring scenery from the windows of high-speed trains, and the images were considered beautiful.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey (1977) notes the following two examples:
First, in a letter dated August 22, 1837, Victor Hugo wrote to his wife that he liked the passing scenery viewed from a moving train. Furthermore, he mentioned that the speed of the train rendered the scenery distorted, spotted and striped. He wrote:
I am reconciled with the railway; it is decidedly very beautiful… The movement is magnificent, and it is necessary to experience it in order to feel so. The speed is extraordinary. The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak; the grain fields are great shocks of yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon.[1]
Second, in English Items; or Microcosmic Views of England and Englishmen written by Matthew Flournoy Ward (1853), the writer also expressed his love for the fleeting images viewed from a running rail car. He explained that when seen from an accelerating train, objects that were near appeared to move quickly and objects that were at a distance appeared to move slowly. He remarked:
The beauties of England being those of a dream, should be as fleeting… They never appear so charming as when dashing on after a locomotive at forty miles (around 64 kilometers) an hour. Nothing by the way requires study, or demands meditation, and though objects immediately at hand seem tearing wildly by, yet the distant fields and scattered trees, are not so bent on eluding observation, but dwell long enough in the eye to leave their undying impression. Every thing is so quiet, so fresh, so full of home, and destitute of prominent objects to detain the eye, or distract the attention from the charming whole, that I love to dream through these placid beauties whilst sailing in the air, quick, as if astride a tornado.[2]
Cézanne was among the first to perceive such a new form of visual perception as lovely, and it appeared that he created new artistic expressions influenced by the perception of the moving scenery produced by the railway, either consciously or unconsciously. Actually, in many of Cézanne’s paintings, his strokes are repeated in the transverse direction, while the ridge lines are emphasized in a horizontal direction, and the images of objects that are nearer appear rougher (Fig. 1, Fig. 2).
Fig. 2 Paul Cézanne The Mont Sainte-Victoire and Large Pine c. 1887
Fig. 3 The Mont Sainte-Victore and the railway bridge at the Arc valley seen from Montbriand
(Photographed by the author on August 24, 2006)
In a letter to his friend Émile Zola (1840-1902) written on April 14, 1878, Cézanne praised the scenery seen from the window of a moving train:
When I went to Marseille I was in the company of Monsieur Gibert. These people see correctly, but they have the eyes of Professors. Where the train passes close to Alexis’s country house, a stunning motif appears on the East side: Ste Victoire and the rocks that dominate Beaurecueil. I said: ‘What a beautiful motif’; he replied: ‘The lines are swaying too much.’ With regard to the ‘Assommoir’ about which, by the way, he spoke to me first, he said some very sensible and laudatory things, but always from the point of view of the technique![3]
A few minutes from Aix-en-Provence Station, the view from the train from Aix to Marseille is similar to the one described by Cézanne. What Cézanne admired as “a beautiful motif” is actually the Mont Sainte-Victoire, which can be seen from the train when it runs through the railway bridge at the Arc valley, as is shown in the center on the right side of his painting (Fig. 3-Fig. 11).
Fig. 4 The Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from the train while passing through the railway bridge at the Arc valley
(Filmed by the author on August 26, 2006)
Fig. 5 The Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from the train while passing through the railway bridge at the Arc valley
(Photographed by the author on August 26, 2006)
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 6, 7, 8, 9 The railway bridge at the Arc valley
(Photographed by the author on August 22, 2006)
Fig. 10 The railway bridge at the Arc valley and the Mont Sainte-Victoire
(Filmed by the author on August 22, 2006)
Fig. 11 The Mont Sainte-Victoire seen over the railway bridge at the Arc valley
(Filmed by the author on August 25, 2006)
Fig. 12 A train in the late 19th century
(Photographed by Émile Zola)
It is worthwhile to note that Cézanne’s letter was written only half a year after the opening of the railway line from Aix to Marseille, including this railway bridge, on October 15, 1877. Moreover, this letter is the first document in which the 39-year-old Cézanne referred to the Mont Sainte-Victoire as a “motif,” and Cézanne began painting the series of the Mont Sainte-Victoire in around 1878.
It is highly probable that the Mont Sainte-Victoire Paintings by Cézanne were inspired by his visual perception as the train passed through this railway bridge at the Arc valley. Cézanne declared that the scenery viewed from a moving train was beautiful; such aesthetic experiences are expressed in his paintings.
Cézanne probably did not sketch the exact scenery through the window of a moving train. Even so, from the perspective of the assimilation of the modernized vision into the products of artistic creativity, it is very important to recognize that Cézanne painted natural landscapes by applying the new type of perception inspired by the train trip.
It is a historical truth that the railway was popular in the 19th century and brought about a visual revolution in daily life then. While scenery seen from moving trains is hardly noticed nowadays, the images that were entirely new to Cézanne were realised in his art. In conclusion, Cézanne played a most prominent role in the transformation of vision in human history (Fig. 12).
[1] Victor Hugo, Correspondance familiale et écrits intimes, tome II (1828-1839), Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991, p. 421. (Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1986, p. 55.)
[2] Cited in Schivelbusch, op. cit., p. 60.
[3] Paul Cezanne, Letters, edited by John Rewald, translated from the French by Marguerite Kay, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995, pp. 158-159. (cf. Paul Cézanne, Correspondance, recueillie, annotée et préfacée par John Rewald, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1937; nouvelle édition révisée et augmentée, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1978, p. 165.)
Fig. 12 is quoted from Emile Zola, Photograph, Eine Autobiographie in 480 Bildern, herausgegeben und zusammengestellt von François-Emile Zola und Massin, München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1979.
