La Tentation de saint Antoine (The Temptation of St. Anthony)

This is Cezanne before the Cezanne most people picture, before the patient apples and the quiet blue mountain. He painted it around 1870, in his early 30s, just as the Franco-Prussian War was breaking out. Rather than report for the army he slipped off to the coast near Marseille, and in these years his work was dark, thickly loaded, and openly turbulent. The old legend of Saint Anthony, the desert hermit tormented by visions of naked women, gave him a licence for exactly that. The paint is pushed on in heavy slabs and the mood is close to violent. Nothing here yet hints at the calm, carefully constructed landscapes that would make his name two decades later.