The Promenade

In the winter of 1870, while Paris was under siege, Cezanne was at L'Estaque, a fishing village outside Marseille, living with Hortense Fiquet and staying out of the war. The army listed him as a defaulter and never found him. He came back north in 1871, the year of this picture. Two women walk in a park, dressed to be looked at. It is a strange subject for him, and he took it from a fashion plate. Cezanne made three paintings in these years out of the illustrations in magazines like La Mode Illustree, keeping the poses and laying the paint on heavily over them. The canvas passed from the painter's son to dealers in Amsterdam and New York, then to a collector in Japan, and has been on deposit at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo since 2022.