The Fishermen (Fantastic Scene)

The Fishermen (Fantastic Scene) of around 1875 belongs to the group of imaginary figure subjects Cézanne produced in the 1870s alongside his landscape and still-life work — a category his critics and early champions frequently overlooked in their focus on the structural still lifes and Provençal landscapes. These fantasy scenes, loosely connected to literary sources or to Cézanne's own imagery, drew on the Romantic tradition of Delacroix and Daumier and on the more explicitly theatrical imagination of the young Cézanne, who had collaborated with his childhood friend Émile Zola on literary projects in their Aix schooldays. By 1875 the 'fantastic' element in his work was giving way to the systematic formal investigation of nature, but this canvas preserves something of the earlier imaginative freedom. The Metropolitan's collection of these transitional works documents a side of Cézanne's production that complicates the narrative of purely formal evolution, showing the imaginative and literary ambitions that ran alongside his analytical program.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.