La Tentation de saint Antoine

Before Cézanne became the painter of still, carefully built landscapes and apples, he made pictures like this, dark and turbulent and full of appetite. Saint Anthony was a hermit in the Egyptian desert, tormented, the story goes, by visions sent to break his faith. Cézanne gives him a nude woman stepping out of the shadows and a demon looming at the edge. He painted it around 1877, and the theme was in the air. Flaubert had published his own feverish Temptation of Saint Anthony only a few years before. What strikes many viewers is how the hermit shrinks from the woman, hunched and turned away, while Cézanne lays the paint on thickly, more sculpted than described.