Die erwürgte Frau

Cézanne is remembered for apples and for the mountain above Aix, so this one comes as a jolt. It is tiny, about 31 centimetres tall, and it shows a figure in a blue jacket bent over a woman in white on the floor, hands at her throat, her hair spilling out to one side. Through the late 1860s and early 1870s he painted a whole run of such things, murders, abductions and drinking parties, laid on thick with the knife. Those were the years when the cheap Paris papers were full of crime reporting and his school friend from Aix, Émile Zola, published Thérèse Raquin, a novel about a killing and the year that follows it. The dating is still argued over. Rewald put the picture at 1875 to 1876, Venturi several years earlier. It was given to the French state in 1973 by the dealer Max Kaganovitch and his wife Rosy.