OIL PAINTING: Bacchanalia, 1880
Cezanne grew up in Aix, in Southern France, a provincial backwater far from the sophistications of Paris. Son of this bourgeois banker, the young Cezanne was forced to study law and work in his dad's bank before being free to pursue art full-time. Cezanne began at art school drawing with passion, and almost from the start, he put his passions into his painting. His early images were often imagined, romantic, sensational, as in this orgy scene. The "Bacchanalia" is melodramatic. So too the "Abduction" painted at age 27. Phase one of Cezanne then, portraying his emotions with brush, palette knife, and large, expressive smears of paint.