Pictures in Church : 458

ALTHOUGH all his life Cezanne was strongly Catholic, yet after his early religious works there is no record that he ever again attempted a religious subject. Nature filled his mind and he found eternity in an apple. However, there is one of his later pictures in the National Gallery which speaks eloquently of Cezanne's profound faith, "The Old Woman with a Rosary." She is bent from years of work, her bands are broad and toughened, her face with its deep-set unfathomable eyes and shrivelled skin expresses much more than the weariness of age which would have made this a desperate picture instead it expresses a kind of puzzled acceptance of God's will, an acceptance made after a great struggle and, in consequence, what might have been grim has become heroic.
Cezanne himself has some curious things to say about this picture. Its subject was an old nun who, slightly deranged, had suddenly left her convent, and Cezanne befriended her.
He painted her while much influenced by Flaubert's writings, and just as Flaubert said that he saw purple while writing "Salammbo" so Charme became obsessed at that time by a reddish-blue colour which seemed to be connected in his mind with "Madame Bovary." Despite distractions, the colour "sang in my soul-I bathed myself entirely in it," he says, and then only later as he looked at his finished painting did he realise that the red of the skin and the blue of the apron together made up the reddishblue of his obsession.
In its profound feeling "The Old Woman with the Rosary" approaches the peasant characters of Flaubert's novels and the portraits of Rembrandt. Here Cezanne achieved what he had always admired, particularly in Courbet and the old masters, a realism full of grandeur.