![]() Cézanne, who worked on occasion at Fontainebleau, would have known of similar photographs, and of the work of some of the earlier painters represented here. The works in these categories span the sixteenth through the nineteenth century and include landscapes by artists of the caliber of Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Claude Lorrain, and by less-known figures, including Gherardo Cibo and Roelandt Savery-as well as photographs taken in the forest of Fontainebleau by Constant Alexandre Famin, Eugène Cuvelier, and others, who used some of the same typologies as the painters. On the basis of our inductive study of works in the Museum’s collections, we present nine categories: The Classical Landscape, The Topographical Landscape, Buildings in a Landscape, Rocky Landscapes, Mountains, Gnarled Trees, Glades, Screens and Panoramas, and Isolated Motifs. Turner had published reproductions of his landscapes in his Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies) arranged in six named categories, but these were too individually specific to Turner (e.g., “Elevated or Epic Pastoral”) to be of use to us. Calvin reminded me that the British painter J. For landscape painting, Kenneth Clark did this too broadly to serve as our model. Notable among art historians to have examined this practice in systematic, albeit markedly different, ways are Ernst Gombrich and George Kubler. In the field of art history, tracking artistic developments in the form of replication, revision, and reimagination of preceding typologies is well established. This realization became the organizing principle of our exhibition. When comparing unlike things, it can take a little longer to notice their similarities-but eventually I became aware that, notwithstanding the radicalism of Cézanne’s approach, he made constant use of standard types of landscape depictions-woodland panoramas, rocky landscapes, glades of trees, and so on-that have been employed by artists for many centuries. It is commonly understood that when you compare very alike things, you notice their differences. Museum Director James Steward suggested that we do so as a gallery installation, and that is what we have done. Therefore, as I planned another Cézanne seminar, for the spring of 2018, it seemed fitting to revisit this idea. The twenty or so works we selected made extremely clear that Cézanne, in his watercolors, did not so much attempt to copy the actual appearance of a scene as to translate it into self-sufficient sequences of patches and lines in a restricted range of vivid colors. ![]() My aim was to reveal the very wide range of approaches in such works-and yet how radical, in contrast, were Cézanne’s landscape watercolors hanging in the galleries. With this in mind, I asked Calvin Brown, associate curator of prints and drawings, to help me choose from the Museum’s collections a selection of landscape works on paper made prior to Cézanne’s, to show to the seminar students in one of the classes. The fall of 2015, when Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection was on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, seemed the ideal time to teach a seminar on Paul Cézanne, so well represented in that collection, most notably by his great landscape watercolors.
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