The eagerness of recent scholars to identify Cezanne's sources has led to Baudelaireanan and Wagnerian readings of the picture. As early as 1936, Michel Florisoone connected this "canvas of somber irony"' to the poetic universe of the Fleurs du mal, where Cythera figures as an "island sad and black ... the banal El Dorado of worn-out roues" where "damned women," "like pensive cattle lying on the sand, ... scan the far horizon of the ocean." More recently, Lawrence Gowing and Mary Tompkins Lewis have seen in it a variation on the bacchanale from Tannhduser, like Fantin-Latour's painting for the Salon of 1864 . Baudelaire and Wagner were much discussed in artistic circles at this time, and they may well have played a role in the genesis of this canvas, although, if so, they were not as crucial to its inception as Manet. But, like The Murder and The Feast , Pastoral is above all a Cezannean phantasm. The nude women, immense and corpulent-who, unlike Manet's courtesan, have not just shed their contemporary clothing-seem to have issued forth from the imagination of the man in black as though it were for his benefit that they strike the timeworn poses of nymphs, Venus, and Antiope, and as a result, come across more as beautiful objects for the painter's brush than as compliant confederates in some rustic escapade. Like them, the nature evoked here is turbid and slow, the large trees reduced to cottony tufts reflected in the still water. There's not the slightest breeze, no hint of sound, and it is difficult to say how the solitary navigator will get to his Cythera, for the sail of his skiff is a sadly dangling affair. We are no longer in the sheer, realist world of Le Dijeuner sur l'herbe but rather in one that looks forward to the paintings of Bathers to come, in which, to paraphrase Degas, the air that circulates is no longer the same air we breathe.

excerpt from

Cezanne
by Isabelle Cahn, Henri Loyrette, Joseph J. Rishel