Les Ivrognes

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.

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.