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The Bridge at Maincy by Cezanne
The Bridge at MaincyOil on canvas, 1880 With the Bridge at Maincy there is incomparable freshness, a marvellous symphony of greens on the calm and sparkling waters, with the arches of white stone joined by the footbridge. The sky, the pink house, the two nearly vertical tree trunks placed forward to open the space behind – everything in this picture combines to make it an unforgettable work. It is no longer a corner or a piece of nature, it is nature whole, seen through the artist’s temperament. The painter has here become a transcendental poet. Through color and form, Cezanne opens to our vision a new universe that goes far beyond the mere subject. Our eyes are drawn into a realm where we would like to be, where all is clean and pure, a refuge from the outer world. It is – despite some doubts to Courbet and the Realists – a state of being, a profound sentiment, surpassing the thing represented. One recalls Baudelaire’s admirable work remark in his introduction to his translation of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Nouvelles Histories Extraorinaires – he speaks of the emotion induced by certain works which are “the testimony of an irritated melancholy, of a prostration of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect, and which would like to seize on this earth a revealed paradise”. In The Bridge at Maincy, Cezanne has truly succeeded in “redoing Poussin on the basis of nature”. His creative spirit bursts forth in color, which becomes his consolation, his everything. Before entering Victor Chocquet’s collection, the work passed through the hands of père Tanguy, the art dealer who, alone at the time, exhibited the canvases of unsuccessful artists in his shop on the Rue Clauzel. “You went to Tanguy’s as to a museum”, said Emile Bernard, “to see whatever studies there were by that unknown artist living in Aix... the young people felt his genius, the old men the folly of paradox, the jealous talked of impotence”. At the Chocquet auction in 1899, this canvas, for which the collector had paid Cezanne 170 francs, went for 2,200 francs. Own An Original Re-Creation
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Hand-painted in oils by a professional artist
