La Tentation de saint Antoine (The Temptation of St. Anthony)

This 1870 canvas of the Temptation of Saint Anthony is one of Cézanne's most overtly romantic and turbulent early works, showing him engaging with a theme that fascinated many nineteenth-century artists. Gustave Flaubert was contemporaneously writing his 'La Tentation de Saint Antoine,' and the subject was in the cultural air of Cézanne's circle. The painting shows the saint beset by fleshy female temptations — a frank erotic fantasy dressed in religious subject matter — and reflects the emotional turbulence of Cézanne's youthful work before Pissarro's influence settled him toward direct observation. The Bührle Collection canvas is a significant early document of his Romantic temperament.

The paint is applied with the heavy, urgently worked impasto typical of Cézanne's early Romantic-influenced period. Dark tonalities predominate, with the pale female figures contrasting against shadowy ground. The composition is energetically disorganized in a way his mature work never is — the turbulence of the subject infecting the handling.