Cézanne’s empathy with an old woman
Apowerful painting in the Cézanne exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London is An Old Woman with a Rosary.
In traditional Provençal dress, she seems to tug at the beads with her arthritic hands instead of placidly telling them. Little is to be gathered from her face, in which the eyes are dark ovals, like Mickey Mouse’s.
The painting was given to Joachim Gasquet, the poet and champion of Provençal culture. The National Gallery in London bought it in 1953.
Gasquet said he had found it on the floor of the artist’s studio, under a coal scuttle. This sounds like an exaggeration, so why did Gasquet put it like that? Had he manipulated the gift?
Six years after painting it in 1896, Cézanne (1839-1906) wrote to borrow it from him for an exhibition. He rarely represents religious themes, and I wondered how the portrait fitted in to his life.
The NPG catalogue states that he had “joined” the Catholic Church in 1891 – hardly a satisfactory way of putting it. He had been baptised as a child and came under religious influences at school (where he met Emile Zola, with whom he fell out decidedly late in life).
Cézanne’s devout sister Marie has been credited for his return to practising his faith. By his own account, which may not be entirely serious, his motive was simple. “It is fear,” he told Paul Alexis. “I feel that I have only a few days left on Earth – and then what? I believe I shall survive and do not want to risk roasting in eternam.”
Although Cézanne developed diabetes in the 1890s, he was still only in his 50s. His biographer, John Rewald, noted that his return to Catholicism “failed to eliminate his swearing”. I don’t see that we should expect it to. Oaths breaching religious taboos are usually found in a religious culture. Anyway, an example Rewald gives is not too shocking. When a painting was going badly he would chant to a tune from Vespers (I don’t know what this could be): “Nom de dieu de nom de dieu de nom de dieu.”
Gasquet has a rather Gothick account of the old woman. She was, he wrote, a nun who had lost her faith and climbed over the convent wall, to be rescued in a state of witlessness by Cézanne. Why she would be saying the rosary if she had lost her faith, he does not say. In any case, when Cézanne wrote to borrow the picture, he referred to her as “the former maid of Marie [Joseph] Demolins”.
I’m afraid we get little help from the art critics about her depiction. The NPG says she is “a figure not so much absorbed in the comfort of prayer as caught in an unseeing, troublingly disconnected and almost feral expression”. Who told them that prayer need be a “comfort”, like a cushion?
To me, the old woman seems empathetically painted, her toughness and spirit visible in her vigorous pose. Her eyes may not look out, but within she must see the mysteries that the rosary commemorates – Christ’s death on the cross, say, or his Resurrection – perhaps bringing deeply felt joys and sorrows to her prayers.
A rosary is still shown off as the one Cézanne inherited from the old woman. It might have been his in the first place. It bears a little carved skull, and he always had a few skulls knocking about the studio.
It has been observed that despite his row with Zola, Cézanne was no violent antidreyfusard. I had no idea that Degas, for example, was anti-semitic. Cézanne remained a friend of the Jewish Pissarro, whom Degas cold-shouldered.
In his last years, with his wife largely absent in Paris, Cézanne lived quietly in Aix, regularly being seen at High Mass, and walking up to his studio daily.