EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Even though Cézanne lived at a time when materialist science was in its ascendancy and Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species had overturned the Old Testament view of prehistory, he still believed like Plato and the ancients that truth or wisdom could only be found by looking inwards to unveil the divine essence inside each individual.

It is important to remember when considering compositions by Cézanne that you are viewing a mental image inside his mind. That is why his female nudes are so clunkily constructed; they are mental images of himself as a female nude in the process of becoming. Now consider the painting at left. What else do you see?

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Just as earlier artists had portrayed themselves as Christ (as revealed on this site) so did Cézanne. The entire image recalls an archetypal head of Christ with the tree trunks on either side as substitutes for the long, curling locks of Christ's hair. The bottom of the woman crouching in the stream defines Christ's chin but all else is left approximate. Your eyes must imagine the details of Christ's face between the trees from the few pointers he has left us and it is not unusual to be certain that you know where the "eyes" are placed one day, only to find that they have moved the next. They are somewhere near the heads of the two women leaning in towards the middle.

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If you have trouble imagining Christ's head within the tree trunks, take a look at Cézanne's massive canvas of Bathers in Philadelphia in which a woman's head is framed again by trees, though with more detailed features on the face itself. Academics refuse to accept the illusion of a girl's head in this canvas. Indeed they poured so much derision on Sidney Geist when he first revealed it that no sensible scholar (God knows, I'm not sensible) would dare suggest it again. 

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Here, in another of the Bathers series, is a third example, again with a woman's head, her eyes closed as though dreaming.

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Cézanne's scenes of women bathing can now be seen as rites of purification inside his androgynous mind where female alter egos are shown "washing away" their egotistical impulses. The stream and nude figures even recall scenes of Christ's baptism in the river by St. John.¹ Others have viewed the figures as derivations from Raimondi's celebrated print The Judgment of Paris which, through a pun, the artist imagined as being the judgment of critics at the Paris Salon. The end-result of this process is the artist's complete identification with God and his creative powers. In later years Cézanne did attend Church though with little enthusasm for the priesthood. He knew, as all artists do, that God is inside us.