Pastorale (Idyll)
by CÉZANNE, Paul, Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm
In his early years in Paris, in addition to a few isolated portraits and landscapes, C�zanne mainly painted serious, gloomily executed scenes of temptation, murder, and abduction. The Pastorale also has the characteristic features of C�zanne’s early work: in unreal moonlight, three naked women and three clothed men are on a river bank. The painting can be interpreted as the young artist’s personal response to Manet’s D�jeuner sur l’herbe, which scandalised the Parisian art world in 1863.