Paul Cézanne (Art Drop #3)

A quick hit on how the French painter influenced writer Ernest Hemingway.

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839 - 1906), Still Life with Apples, French, 1893–1894, Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 81.6 cm (25 3/4 × 32 1/8 in.), 96.PA.8. via Getty Museum

Two Quotes Tell All

I.

He, Nick, wanted to write like Cézanne painted. He wanted to write about country so it would be there the way Cézanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick. Nobody had ever written about country like that. He felt almost holy about it.

—Ernest Hemingway
From his short story “Big Two-Hearted River”

II.

When you were skipping meals at a time when you’d given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy…

You could always go into the museum there and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.

I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought it was possibly only that he’d forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you’ve been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

—Ernest Hemingway
A Moveable Feast