Part of the mystery of this picture lies in its many titles. In addition to the well-known title Scene Fantastique, the painting has also been called; A Day In June, A Day In July, Friday, Sunday Afternoon, River Landscape With Fishermen, and the title under which it is likely to remain...The Fishermen.
I have often wondered where the various titles had originated, and whether any had referred to an original finished work prior to the fishermen group being added.
At the time of the third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877, the Cézanne Online Catalogue specifies the title had been;
Les Pêcheurs – Journée de juillet, c.1875 (634).
The official statistics from the Metropolitan Museum website;
Title
The Fishermen (Fantastic Scene)
- - Date - - - - - - - - - Medium - - - - - - - - - Dimensions - - - -
- ca. 1875 - - - - - - Oil on canvas - - - - - - 21 3/4 x 32 1/4 in. -
Gallery Label
This painting was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition, in 1877. It is thought that the man shown from the back in the lower left corner was originally meant to depict an artist, perhaps Cézanne himself. The imagery, a composite of scenes of leisure, derives from paintings by Manet and Monet from the 1860s. Underlying the Impressionist motifs are prototypes found in the work of Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese. Cézanne often included references to Venetian painting when he was working in his pastoral mode—a strain in his art that culminated in the late pictures of bathers.
Among the works of Paul Cézanne, I consider his 1875 river landscape titled "The Fishermen" to be directly related to my painting.
This figure composition, also known as Scene Fantastique, is one of the most enigmatic figure paintings produced by the artist, painted at the height of his Impressionist period.
In order to avoid confusion with the title I have given my painting The Fisherman, for the purposes of this discussion I will use the title Scene Fantastique in describing the painting in the Metropolitan Museum.
I have devoted the majority of my homepage, *The Fisherman, to my theories regarding the sources and studies for the subject of that painting.
It is my theory that the subject of The Fisherman represents a tribute to Camille Pissarro, depicted in the form of Voltaire after the bronze bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon. It was not to imbue Pissarro with the spirit of Voltaire, I believe Cézanne was imbuing the bronze image of Voltaire the philosopher, with the living spirit of Pissarro the painter philosopher, posed heroically in front of the canvas in the bright sun, his frayed sash symbolizing the colors of his palette.
This was not a portrait of Pissarro, this was the embodiment of the essence of Pissarro the painter, outdoors in his domain, Cézanne's tribute to Pissarro, and to all of the plein air painters who had preceeded him. Simply put, Portrait de l'Artiste.
I believe that the Voltaire/Pissarro figure was then reprised in Scene Fantastique as the standing figure highlighted against the canvas among the group of fishermen, representing Camille Pissarro and the School of Pontoise. Les Artistes
I came to this realization through the study of a period photograph, which when viewed through the filter of The Fisherman, became a treasure trove of discoveries and insights into how Cézanne, at least for a time, had overcome his demons.
There is a group photo said to have been taken in Camille Pissarro's garden which appears to have been the source of inspiration for Scene Fantastique, the poses for the artist's renewed series of self-portraits beginning in 1875, and the composition of The Fisherman.
In the 2007 Deutsche Welle-TV documentary 'An Extraordinary Journey, or Hello Again, Cézanne!', a narrative of the provenance of Scene Fantastique, Gary Tinterow, the former curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York commented; "It's hard for me to call it beautiful, that's not a word that comes to mind, but it's fascinating, it's intriguing".
Part of the intrigue lies in the diversity of the subjects, and the manner in which the artist has grouped them, both in action and at rest, in bright sunlight and in the shade.
Perhaps the greatest intrigue of all is why the artist had apparently decided to paint the group of fishermen and their boat over the top of what appears to have been a finished work.
Cézanne seems to have been exuberant with his progress living and working in Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise, and evocative in his tribute to Pissarro and the School of Pontoise, depicting them as fishermen working from nature.
"It's a strange conjunction of labor, the work, the fishermen, and people taking a stroll, and seemingly unawares of this labor that's going on in the foreground, so it's as if two worlds, the leisure class and the labor class, I don't know that Paul Cézanne is reading Karl Marx at this time..." - Gary Tinterow
The subjects are divided into small groups along the riverbank, and whether relaxing in the shade, enjoying themselves in the warmth of the sunlight, or reacting to the wind, everyone is interacting with nature. Meanwhile the fishermen have unfurled their sail, setting out to fill their nets with nature’s harvest.
The significance of the lone subject at the lower left seems less obvious.
"I think he represents us, the viewer, the omnipresent person who is omniscient, who sees everything. As some people have said perhaps it's Cézanne himself but, we don't know." - Gary Tinterow
There are several of the artist's figure paintings which some people describe as narrative self-portraits. Since I consider Scene Fantastique an important link to my painting, in this case I needed to try to ascertain whether or not Cézanne had included himself in this painting.
I had studied the biographies, the photos, the drawings, the sketchbooks, and the paintings since the late 1980s, and as far as I could tell, most of the Cézanne figures in these putative narrative self-portraits are simply men with beards who don’t otherwise resemble Cézanne in the periods they were painted.
In this case, the only clues we have to help identify the man at the lower left of Scene Fantastique are his clothing, his top hat, and his walking stick, none of which would suggest it was Cézanne.
This figure seems important enough to have been conspicuously framed by the grass, highlighting him against a sandy background, yet the figure seems to abruptly turn away from the fishermen and this beautiful setting which is their studio, while he himself has chosen the dry, dusty path which leads away from this fantastic scene.
Looking at Cézanne's works, his personality, and the events of his life through the filter of The Fisherman, my research strategy over the years has evolved around trying to think like Cézanne. I believe The Fisherman had been an important triumph for the artist on many levels, this was why he imortalized the Voltaire/Pissarro figure in Scene Fantastique, so we would know who the figure represented.
When I noticed the artist do something unusual in his early portraits and figure compositions, I felt compelled to scrutinize the anomaly, always vigilant for the traces of narratives and evolution.
One such unusual occurrence was the mysterious figure in the lower left corner which was purposely painted with minimum yet specific identifying features where the artist had painstakingly rendered the torso, raised arm, and walking stick of the figure in such a way as to form the letter M, all within the highlighted area. The elbow even appears to have been retouched to accentuate the feature.
Looking at it from an art historical perspective, I am inclined to theorize that the man at the lower left represents Edouard Manet, turning away from the artists of the *Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs etc. prior to their first group exhibition in 1874. (*represented here by the School of Pontoise fishermen group)
Some historians believe that the tipping point for Manet's decision not to exhibit with the Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs etc. in 1874 had been their discussions of whether or not to include Paul Cézanne, an era appropriate clue to the narrative of Scene Fantastique.
Going back to their earliest meetings, Cézanne and Manet were like like oil and water. The artist clearly thought highly of Manet’s work and his activism in presenting the new art to the public, but had always felt uncomfortable in his presence. Yet Cézanne would often borrow Manet’s themes and compositions, which in many cases Manet had borrowed from someone else.
Scene Fantastique may have been Cézanne’s makeover of Manet’s Le Péche from 1861. It appears that the artist had repurposed the theme, cleverly including Manet himself, and reworking it in his School of Pontoise inspired Impressionist mode to bring the dark and dreary scene to vibrant life.
Cézanne had demonstrated that the aspects which should be most important to the overall work are the magnificent effects of nature, the Sun, the wind, the water, and the effects of those forces on the figures. Manet's nearly invisible fishermen, have become the focus of the story, while the Manet figure is now depicted with his back to the viewer.
Was it was Manet's decision not to exhibit with the Impressionists that had inspired Cézanne to repurpose the original river landscape to include the Manet figure, the fishermen group, and their boat?
What emerges from this work is Cézanne's interpretation of the tenets of Impressionism. The monumental effects of the Sun and wind permeate this painting, the sensation of movement is palpable, and one can easily imagine the sound of the wind in the trees, the flapping of the sail, and the many intermingled voices carried with the breeze over the splashing water.
Based on the fact that Scene Fantastique had been exhibited in the third Impressionist exhibition, I also suggest that it's companion work, the Voltaire/Pissarro tribute portrait I have titled The Fisherman had been the painting exhibited at the Salon of 1882 under the title Portrait de M. L. A....
I have compiled all available published comments on the painting which was hung in the Salon of 1882 in my * Portrait de M. L. A... Studies page because at the time I began to research my painting, the portrait remained unidentified by every biographer and historian who had mentioned it and represented a well-known lost work by the artist, placing it at the top of my research agenda.
One of my first exposures to Portrait de M. L. A... had been John Rewald's comments in his biography of the artist, where he passed along some very specific information without any speculation as to which painting it may have been:
"It was only in 1882 that Guillemet managed to have a canvas of Cézanne's 'accepted' by using his prerogative as a member of the jury to exhibit the work of one of his students. Cézanne, who had sent in a 'Portrait de Monsieur L.A.' is thus listed in the catalogue as a 'pupil of Antoine Guillemet'. But his portrait did not attract public attention, and a critic, taking the 'pupil of Antoine Guillemet' for novice, wrote: ' Monsieur L.A. is painted with wide brush-strokes. The shadow of the eye-socket and that of the right cheek as well as the quality of the light-tones presage a future colourist.' (Paul Cézanne - Spring Books, 1948 pp. 115-16, 191)
This was a good description of the subject of The Fisherman.
Around 2010 when the Metropolitan Museum finally added that high resolution photo of the painting to their website, it was like putting on a pair of eyeglasses which made many previously invisible details visible. Eventually the Met added a downloadable version of the photo, which I used to produce the following video.
When I had first settled on Paul Cézanne, one of the main checklist items to suggest his modus operandi was the non-descript background of my painting. What seemed out of the ordinary was that the background wasn't uniformly non-descript, it changed from right to left. Long before I had found the high resolution photo of the painting at the Met website, the images of the fisherman highlighted in front of the sail in Scene Fantastique I had found in various books helped me come to the realization that my painting's unusual background could have no better description than the canvas of a sail.
It also occurred to me that although he wore a beret, the fisherman in Scene Fantastique appeared to be an old man who resembled the subject of my painting. Years later when I could see the details of the man's face more clearly in the high definition photo, my suspicions seemed to be confirmed.
Considering the lack of facial details given nearly all of the other subjects, there is something special about the man in front of the sail, and the man seated in the front of the boat. Although berets cover their heads, their facial features are similarly complete.
The standing man's three-quarter profile with the opposing eye barely visible, is similar (in reverse) to the subject in The Fisherman. Clearly the artist paid special attention to the subject's face which is brightly lit on the nose, cheekbone, and forehead. We can even see a sunlit ear glowing above the shadows of the subject's cheek. That's a lot of specific details for a single figure.
The subject next to him in the boat, also highlighted against the sail, is similarly well-defined in a right three-quarter profile, his features are not distorted, and his profile is well lit. I had long suspected that the standing fisherman was painstakingly detailed to invoke the subject in my painting, but who was the other figure given such special treatment?
Notes on plate 321, the compositional study for Scene Fantastique from The Drawings Of Paul Cézanne; A Catalogue Raisonné;
I have difficulty making sense of Chappuis' comments on plate 321: "In the oil, the artist in a top hat in the left foreground is simply carrying a stick, whereas in our drawing, he is standing in front of his easel".
To my eye, the man in the top hat is holding a walking stick in both the oil and the drawing, the only difference I see is that the man seems to have raised his walking stick in the drawing, as if he is making a gesture of greeting to the fisherman who is standing in front of the sail, the only member of the group facing in his direction. And, given the angle at which the circle defining his face has been drawn, the fisherman seems to have raised his chin in acknowledgement of the greeting.
I was also surprised at how brief Chappuis' comments had been as regards the various subjects in the drawing, their makeup, and any thoughts as to whether the fishermen and their boat had been added to the drawing, since the lines indicating the sail overlap the right arm of the man reclining on the opposite bank: "The group on the right is very different in the drawing and the landscape on the distant bank farther away."
It is uncertain which group on the right Chappuis is referring to, but it seemed odd that he had not mentioned the four unusual subjects in the upper right background of the drawing: At the right we can see a couple sharing an embrace. This is a rarity for the artist, in most cases women are not shown happily embracing a man. The only example I could find among the figure composition paintings is the couple found in another fishing scene, Le Pêcheur à la ligne 1869-70 (FWN 604-TA)
Just beside the lovers, we find what appears to be *one subject strangling another subject whose head is just above the head of the man reclining on the riverbank. (*reminicent of the scene in La Femme étranglée 1875–76. FWN 636)
From the drawing to the painting, the seated subject in the front of the boat was simplified to a more vertically oriented head and shoulders, and it appears plausible that the outstretched arms which were omitted from that subject, were then re-purposed as the arms of the man crouched on the riverbank in the painting, whose arms had previously hung straight down in the drawing.
The fishermen group and their boat, the man at the lower left, the lovers, the strangler, and his victim appear to have been added to the original compositional study.
While the artist was able to superimpose the boat over the original scene to study the composition prior to modifying a finished river landscape painting, it seems clear that the drawing was not originally composed with a sailboat in mind, perhaps a rowboat if there had been a boat at all on that narrow winding stream.
As an update to that thought, just today in 2024 after years of analyzing this drawing, I dicovered the second sailboat, found just below the handkerchief of the woman with the parasol. The slightly ambiguous shape of the cruciform mast and sail, the boat, and its single occupant are the only indication of distance to be seen in the drawing, I believe this was another feature added to the original study.
Once I saw it, the second sailboat was quite effective in its simplicity, and I realized it as the source of the distant second sailboat the artist had similarly positioned in the painting.
The fishermen group and the boat seem forced into the available space, yet the artist clearly had an idea about a scene with a group of fishermen and a sailboat which he had manifested in this study.
As regards the drawing, the addition of the various boats and narrative figures, made for an interesting glimpse into the mind of the artist as the light bulb popped-on above his head.
As though he has taken what appears to have been a completed study with the seven figures, inserted references to love and hate existing side by side, and the fishermen group to represent the comradery of the School of Pontoise. One can imagine him smiling and muttering something under his breath as he sketched-in the details of the fishermen and their boat.
But something else remarkable happened from the drawing to the painting. There is an associated ink drawing of the woman and child with raised arms, which is essentially the same as the drawing, but behind them in the drawing is another child which appears to be asleep. In the painting, the standing girl has both arms outstretched as children do leaning into a strong wind. The girl on the ground has her arms outstretched in the same manner, but she has playfully succumbed to the fierce wind. As if to call further attention to his intentional depiction of the wind, the sail that had hung limp in the drawing, is taught in the painting and billowing towards the fishermen highlighting them with sunlight.
I believe that my studies of the Pissarro garden photo indicate that Cézanne had not depicted himself as the mystery man at the lower left in Scene Fantastique as Gary Tinterow suggested, but rather as the subject who is seated in the front of the boat, sharing the highlighted sail with the standing man, representing Camille Pissarro, the man the artist called the father of his painting.
Scene Fantastique is clearly plausible as a narrative self-portrait.
I have posted this small image to demonstrate the size I had originally seen the photo in the biography "Paul Cézanne" by John Rewald (Spring Books London). There were many details I had not noticed, and some details which had always drawn my attention. The caption read: "Cézanne (seated) and Pissarro (standing at right) in Pissarro's garden in Pontoise," c. 1873. Rewald credited the photo "Courtesy of Julien Pissarro"
I have seen the location of this photo listed online as the village of Auvers-sur-Oise and the subjects of this photo as L-R; Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin, Frédéric Samuel Cordey, Victor Vignon, and Camille Pissarro. That said, there is no way that Cordey, who was born in 1854, could have been the boy seated next to Guillaumin, and from the few self-portraits I have seen of Vignon, he does not resemble the man next to Pissarro.
I had seen the smaller format versions of the photo in books over the years without giving it any special importance other than the fact that my eye was always drawn to the man nearest to Pissarro and his strange posture leaning over his raised left knee, with his left foot canted to the right. Then there were his hands, which by some photographic distortion don’t look like they belong together. One hand seems too large, which makes the other seem too small.
With his crossed hands resting on a curved stick, his raised left knee and foot, and the shadows of his left thigh, the man appears to be deformed in some way. It somehow feels as though he was the focus of the photo taken among the group, and that he had struck an odd pose. At the same time his pose is so random that it would be difficult to knowingly place oneself, or be posed in such an unusual position at the end of the bench with the curved stick.
Meanwhile, the three subjects most viewers would recognize seem to be oblivious to the fact they are being photographed. Most people viewing this photo will see Cézanne and Pissarro, and then turn the page. Yet I can't help but think that when they saw this photo, it was quite the conversation piece due to the remarkable combination of the man's pose, the bench, and that curved stick. Cézanne had worked hard over the years composing his still-lifes to realize similar combinations, and I believe that this photo had tapped in him an organic source of creativity.
Just as the details of Scene Fantastique were difficult to see in many reproductions of the painting found in books, there were details in the garden photo which were not apparent in small format versions which have been reproduced in books on the artist.
The large clear version below clearly shows details which appear to have been painted onto the figure standing next to Pissarro, the same details which are seen in the photo included in Rewald's "Paul Cézanne" which had indicated the photo had belonged to Julien Pissarro.
Somebody added those specific details to that photograph.
These details seem to describe a raised right knee painted over the man's right thigh, and what may be details suggesting a sash at the man's waist and right side. Once I had noticed them, I found these apparently over-painted details important since the subject of The Fisherman has both a raised right knee, and a sash.
It is worth mentioning that one of the paintings of Uncle Dominique Portrait of a Man ca 1866, also features a subject leaning over a raised knee, and I believe the similarity had drawn Cézanne's attention to this figure's pose just as my attention had been.
This new version of the old photo in Pissarro's garden was an eye opener, and as I continued my usual rounds of searching through the artist’s paintings and drawings for anything relevant, I kept it in mind.
I also made it a priority to investigate the other subjects in the photo.
I believe the young boy seated next to Guillaumin is likely Lucien Pissarro.
Once I got beyond the anomalies of Béliard’s pose and the seemingly overpainted features, the photo in Pissarro’s garden produced many discoveries which had been in plain sight all along.
My studies of the artist’s drawings and sketches had made me aware that he was adept at reversing figures, still life objects and body parts. At some point I realized that the details of the arms, hands, and the features of the folds of the cloth of the subject’s shirt in my painting were composed by rearranging the well defined features of Béliard’s coat, hands, and arms in the photograph taken in Pissarro's garden.
On a subsequent routine search of the Chappuis catalogue I spotted the study of a left hand (CH 564, FWN 3009-00) which appears to have been drawn from the left hand of Béliard. I believe the artist reversed this hand to make it the right hand of the fisherman, painting it as a reversed duplicate of Uncle Dominique’s left hand from L’Avocat minus the thumb, which was then added to a reversed version of Béliard’s right hand to become the fisherman’s left hand holding the jug. As always, he was able to repurpose details from photos, paintings and drawings to achieve his composition.
I believe the fisherman's pose to be stylistically related to Cézanne's portraits of Antony Valabrègue, and to his series of portrait studies of his Uncle Dominique, the latter series representing a progressive transition from head and shoulders portraits to half-body poses with arms and hands. The subject in The Fisherman may represent the culmination of the artist's research based on those two subjects.
There is anecdotal evidence of Cézanne using photos for his figures in the 1860's, so whether the use of the garden photo to compose the body of a portrait subject had been suggested to Cézanne by Pissarro, perhaps as a means to work around his impatience with sitters, or the artist had come up with it on his own is impossible to say. And, considering the unusual physical appearance of the man in the photo, it may have even been a challenge of some sort to take the lemons presented by the man's strange posture, and make lemonade.
Just when I thought I had found all of the Easter eggs in Pissarro's garden, I found another version which I had never seen, and it unexpectedly brought me back to Scene Fantastique.
As we can see in this rare, full-sized version of the photo in Pissarro's garden, the over-painted details of the man next to Pissarro are no longer visible, indicating that there must have been multiple prints. The gentleman at the left of the photo wearing a tailed coat and top-hat, provides us with a plausible source for the man in the top-hat on the far shore in Scene Fantastique. This man's well attired appearance, which clashes with the bohemian appearance of the other subjects, may have been the reason for his having been cropped from the well-known photo.
I believe this man is the artist's friend, the painter Antoine Guillemet. Ironically, in this photo Guillemet stands apart from the others, more of a bystander than a member of the group. Guillemet was an aspiring Salon conformist who went on to become a member of the jury, and was eventually able to take advantage of his position to exhibit a painting of Cézanne's in the Salon of 1882.(Portrait de M. L. A...) The montage below includes Guillemet as depicted by Édouard Manet in his 1868 figure painting The Balcony, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1869.
This photo reminded me of John Rewald's comments on the artists working with Pissarro in Pontoise in his biography of Cézanne (p.82);
"In September 1872, Pissarro proudly informed Guillemet: 'Béliard is still with us. He is doing very serious work at Pontoise .... Guillaumin has just spent several days at our house; he paints during the daytime, and in the evening works at his ditch-digging. What courage! Our friend Cézanne raises our expectations, and I have seen and have at home a painting of remarkable vigour and power. If, as I hope, he stays some time in Auvers, where he is going to live, he will astonish a lot of the artists who were too hasty in condemning him.'"
Here they were, including Antoine Guillemet, as if he had travelled to Pontoise to see what Pissarro had described with his own eyes.
The importance of this period in Cézanne's development, and this photo representing the moral support of his longtime friends Antoine Guillemet, Armand Guillaumin, and Camille Pissarro cannot be overstated.
About the time I had completed identifying the subjects in the larger format photo, was when I suddenly noticed that the tree and rope in the background behind Armand Guillaumin and Lucien Pissarro suggested a mast and a sail, and that Guillaumin and the seated figure of Cézanne himself were in the same positions as the standing Voltaire/Pissarro figure and the seated fisherman in the front of the boat. In the following comparison, I will demonstrate how the man highlighted in front of the sail in Scene Fantastique, and the man seated next to him wearing the beret, were apparently composed from the seated figure of Cézanne himself, and the man standing behind him in the garden photo.
A comparison of the detail of these two figures from Scene Fantastique with a detail of the same two figures in Cézanne's drawing "Imaginary Scene" circa 1873, the compositional study for Scene Fantastique, seems to verify that the pair in the painting were composed from the two subjects in the garden photo.
In fact, a closer look reveals what may have inspired the use of the boat with the sail. Note that in the photo, to the right of the standing man behind the artist (Guillaumin), there is a taut rope in the background, and to his left behind the boy, there is a tree trunk. The rope describes the edge of the sail, and the tree trunk describes the mast of a sailboat.
Scene Fantastique is partly composed of various groupings of figures which are obvious, such as the red-haired women and children in the left foreground, the couple on the far shore, and the group of fishermen. In the background the groupings and the figures themselves are ambiguous, as though they are just suggestions of figures left to the viewer's imagination. Then, as if to verify that an earlier work had been modified, there are two figures who are obscured by the mast.
The male figure under the trees partially hidden behind the sail is recognizable by his blue trousers, and I suppose it could be argued that he was painted that way after the sail was painted, perhaps in reference to the man who was partially obscured on the far shore after the sailboat was added in the drawing. I have attempted to ask the Metropolitan Museum whether they had ever x-rayed the painting to determine what the original looked like below the sail, without any response.
But what about the (suggested?) figure just below him, the one who is presumably wearing the top hat? Or has the hat blown off of someone's head in the wind? In the context of the finished work, exactly where a figure wearing the hat would have been standing is uncertain. It seems clear that the man obscured by the sail and the floating tophat were deliberate, because whereas the mast is solidly rendered just above one and just below the other, the artist has minimized the depiction of the mast between them, in-effect ensuring that they are noticed.
Another seemingly obvious chapter of the Scene Fantastique narrative, was that after ten years since his last self-portrait, Cézanne painted three self-portraits dating to 1875, one of which is in the same pose as the Voltaire/Pissarro figure highlighted in front of the sail (Armand Guillaumin in the garden photo), and two self-portraits in the pose of the man seated in the front of the boat (the artist himself in the garden photo). In the following years Cézanne continued painting self-portraits, and nearly all of them were slight variations of those two poses.
Looking at the other two fishermen, one wears a straw hat, the other a billed cap, and among the first six self-portraits of that series beginning in 1875 were included self-portraits in a straw hat (FWN 446), and in a billed cap (FWN 435), both in the pose of the standing fisherman, which was based on the pose of Armand Guillaumin from the garden photo.
Like the two other fishermen in Scene Fantastique, whether they wore a coat or a vest over it, all of the fishermen the artist had painted up to 1875 wore a long sleeved white shirt. Just as he had drawn attention to them by highlighting them against the sail and adding extra touches to their faces, the Voltaire/Pissarro and Cézanne fishermen figures are attired differently from all other fishermen.
This is one of those wonderful things about the online catalogue, to be able to say after a short ten minute search, that among all of the men, in all of the figure compositions and portraits the artist painted, I could find only three where the artist had included a beret, two were in Scene Fantastique, the third a self-portrait (FWN 529) also painted in the pose of the Cézanne figure in the front of the boat.
However there was much more to be celebrated, for the studies of Voltaire’s head and ears were not just preparatory studies for the self-portraits, along with the details from the garden photo they had also led to the creation of the Voltaire/Pissarro figure in The Fisherman, a role which the artist reprised as the man highlighted in front of the sail in the tribute to the School of Pontoise in Scene Fantastique.
And, if as I suspect, the man in the front of the boat represents the artist himself (as positioned in the garden photo) we do indeed have a narrative self-portrait.
Yet the narrative doesn’t stop there, Scene Fantastique appears to have marked the end of an era, the pairs of women in conversation, the promenades along the shore or in the park, and ironically the scenes with fishermen, all of which had been his among his mainstays.
The remaining inhabitants are amazingly rendered to give the most effect to the life of the painting while minimizing attention to unnecessary details, and maximizing the details which will allow each viewer to create their own interpretations of what they are seeing.
Arrayed nearby we see two women. One is holding a parasol which seems to fix the position of the Sun for the viewer, while the other seems to be gesturing to someone across the water. Just as the parasol indicates the position of the Sun, the two children give us our first indication that the wind is blowing as one faces into the wind with outstretched hands as if attempting to fly, while her companion has dramatically succumbed to the force of the wind, falling over backwards with her arms outstretched in the same manner as her companion. In the shadows of these four subjects, we are again reminded of the position of the Sun, yet the stand of trees in the upper left corner seems to cast no shadows in that direction.
Across the water on the far side, the foliage of the trees seems to shiver in the wind, and in the couple closest to the sail, we see that the woman has lowered her parasol to the ground, and tilted her head as if to hold onto her hat. The man's top-hat is tilted at a similar angle, and his coat tails appear to be waving in the breeze. Strangely, although they are out in the open, neither of them seems to cast a shadow. Above them another group seems to be sheltering beneath the trees, perhaps to escape the wind, or the fierce sunlight. To the extreme right of this group, we see another woman with a parasol, shown at a similar angle to the parasol of the woman on the near shore.
Looking at the full-sized garden photo, I like to think that Cézanne had decided to base the figure of the top-hatted bourgeois dandy strolling with his young lady, on his friend Antoine Guillemet, instead of using him for the man at lower left. Considering what we can see of the man, a mere silhouette really, the best description is "the Man". Perhaps the artist had not only been the forerunner of modern art, but also of the modern slang term "The Man".... I think he would have loved the irony.
At this point, the various titles for this picture seem appropriate to both the landscape and its inhabitants,... until we focus on the group of fishermen, at which point the other subjects who are at leisure, become noticeably separate from the men who are at work. I believe the group of fishermen represent the small group of artists studying with Pissarro in Pontoise, the Pontoise School so to speak.
The other three subjects at the right of the painting are interesting as well. There is the man who, with the exception of his top-hat, has been obscured by the sail. And then above him, another man who has been cut in half vertically by the sail. And finally, highlighted in the triangular space between the trees, there is a woman whose pose is reminiscent of the subject in Monet's "Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son", also painted in 1875, and also painted on a sunny, breezy day.
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