15/6/23 - Acquisition - Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland - The National Gallery of Ireland - which Caroline Campbell took over from Sean Rainbird last November - has acquired its first painting by Paul Cézanne. Life in the Fields was acquired from the Agnews gallery in London, thanks to the support of the Irish government and a generous anonymous donor. It has already taken its place in one of the rooms devoted to the museum’s rich collection of late 19th-century European art. This acquisition is all the more prestigious given that the painting belonged to the collection of the legendary art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who played a decisive role in the artist’s career, organising his first solo exhibition in 1895.
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- Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Life in the Fields, 1876-1877
Oil on canvas - 27.6 x 35.2 cm
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland
Photo: National Gallery of Ireland - See the image in its page
Put up for auction at Freeman’s in Philadelphia in April 2018 during the sale of part of the collection of the great American heiress Dorrance "Dodo" Hill Hamilton, it was sold for $1.45 million. The painting had not been shown publicly since the American component - at the Philadelphia Museum of Art - of the major Cézanne retrospective of 1995-1996, which was first held at the Grand Palais in Paris and then at the Tate Gallery in London. It should be noted that, in the absence of a canvas, the National Gallery of Ireland already held a late watercolour by the artist, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves, dated 1902-1904, of which a version painted in oil around 1904-1906 is held by the Kunstmuseum in Basel.
Painted between 1876 and 1877, Life in the Fields marked a turning point in the artist’s career, when he abandoned his first style, which he himself described as "couillarde" ("ballsy"), in favour of a lighter, more colourful palette and wider, parallel brushstrokes characteristic of his second, or Impressionist, period. 1877 was also the year in which Cézanne took part in the third Impressionist exhibition, three years after his participation in the first. Five figures stand in a landscape, with a stream and a boat between the trees in the foreground and a hill topped by a farmhouse in the background. Their roughly sketched silhouettes depict farm workers at rest, with the possible exception, as Caroline Campbell suggests, of the male figure seated at bottom left, who appears to be drawing on the motif and could be a self-portrait.
Suggested rather than described, the composition is not an open-air study but a scene composed in the studio, inspired by the artist’s native Provence, which he regularly visited - before moving there permanently at the end of the 1880s - from Jas de Bouffan, the family home in Aix-en-Provence. This pastoral scene may well have been inspired by the fifteen-hectare estate, which had an agricultural character, particularly in terms of wine-growing. In the end, Cézanne took very little interest in the world of agriculture and its protagonists, and the painting that joins the Dublin collections belongs to a very limited corpus, confined to the two years 1876-1877. Apart from the watercolour sketch in preparation for Life in the Fields (private collection) mentioned in the Freeman’s auction house notice, this small group of rural canvases, always modest in size, includes The Fountain (private collection), The Bowlers, as yet unlocated, The Drunkards from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and The Harvest, which is also in private hands and has a composition similar to that of Life in the Fields. A group of peasants at rest is gathered between two trees in the foreground, while a hill topped by a farmhouse can be seen in the background. The place is nonetheless undifferentiated, and the Provençal landscape depicted is idealised, as evidenced by the central female figure with a jug borrowed from Poussin’s Eliezer and Rebecca. On the subject of the Arcadian dimension of Cézanne’s landscapes and the classical character of his work, which is imbued with numerous literary and artistic references, we refer you to the catalogue of the exhibition devoted to Cézanne en Provence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and then at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence in 2006 (see article).