Les Ivrognes
Paul Cézanne·1876
Historical Context
Les Ivrognes (The Drunkards), at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, is an early Cézanne figure composition from around 1876 that reflects his engagement with subject matter drawn from lower-class Provençal life — the taverns, card players, and drinking companions of Aix and its surroundings. The subject matter connects Cézanne to the Realist tradition of Courbet and Daumier, whose directness and refusal of academic idealism he admired, while his treatment already shows the formal ambitions that distinguish him from his sources. The Tel Aviv Museum's holding of this work reflects the global distribution of Cézanne's early paintings through twentieth-century art dealing.
Technical Analysis
Cézanne renders the drunkard figures with the dark, somewhat turbulent handling of his early period, the figures' forms built through strong tonal contrast and emphatic brushwork. The compositional disposition of the bodies — heavy, slightly unstable — physically embodies the work's subject through formal rather than narrative means.
Look Closer
- ◆The drinking figures are arranged loosely around a table, their overlapping forms rendered in heavy dark contours typical of Cézanne's early figural work.
- ◆Wine glasses on the table are given specific transparency — Cézanne renders the glass as a cool light passage within the warm brown tavern interior.
- ◆The figures' faces are broadly handled with large flat areas of paint — less psychological individuation than in his later card players.
- ◆The tavern ceiling and walls recede in a shallow, ambiguous space — the spatial logic is less resolved than in his mature architectural compositions.
- ◆Heavy impasto in the clothing and table surface suggests Cézanne was applying paint with a palette knife as well as a brush — a technique he would later abandon.
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