Pastorale

Nobody has quite agreed on what is happening in this picture. Over the years it has been called Pastorale, Idyll, Bacchanal and Feast by the Sea, and when the dealer Ambroise Vollard entered it in his stock book he settled for a plain inventory, nude and clothed figures in various positions by the water. Pale naked women stretch and turn under dark trees, a man in black lies on the grass, and a bottle stands at the water's edge. Cézanne, then 31, painted the scene from imagination. A number painted on the boat by the shore is taken to be the date, 1870, although the Musée d'Orsay notes that it reads more easily as 1270. The canvas reached the museum in 1982 from the family of the collector Auguste Pellerin, accepted by the state in place of inheritance tax.