The Temptation of Saint Anthony

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c.1877) at the Musée d'Orsay engages one of the great subjects of French nineteenth-century painting and literature — Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) had been published just three years before this canvas, renewing interest in the desert hermit beset by demonic visions. The subject fascinated the Romantic and post-Romantic imagination as an image of visionary experience, sexuality, and spiritual struggle. Cézanne's early versions of the temptation theme — he returned to it several times in the late 1860s and 1870s — belong to his dark, psychologically intense early period when he was working through powerful emotional energies before Pissarro's influence redirected him toward direct observation. The Orsay's holding situates this among his other early works, allowing the transition from his expressionist early manner to the structured clarity of his mature work to be traced. James Ensor in Belgium and Gustave Moreau in Paris were also engaged with such visionary subjects at this period.

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.