The Temptation of Saint Anthony

A woman raises a white cloth above her head and stands almost in the middle of Cézanne’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony . At the left, a dark-robed figure kneels beneath a red-winged presence. Small bodies gather near the woman’s feet, while trees and a streaked blue sky enclose the scene. The painting stages a confrontation, but its figures do not share a simple, open space. Their overlapping gestures and the crowded edges make the viewer work to locate Anthony and to decide where the vision begins.

The canvas belongs to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The museum dates it to about 1877 and measures it at 47.2 × 56 cm. ^[1]

A vision crowded into a small canvas

The central woman lifts the cloth with one raised arm; the other reaches down toward a small figure. It forms a pale arch over her head, then falls in broken strips beside her shoulders. Her body is much lighter than the surrounding trees and the saint’s robe. Even before the eye has identified the narrative, the cloth and skin make a vertical path from the blue sky to the earth. Her stance is not entirely steady: one leg bears her weight while the other bends and seems to turn toward the figures below.

Anthony is harder to find. His dark garment merges with the lower left corner, and his head sits below the red shape that spreads across the upper left. A pale face and hands emerge from the near-black mass. His bent position makes him shorter in the picture than the standing woman, though he occupies considerable space. The scene therefore gives the figure under temptation less immediate visibility than the figure who embodies it.

The red presence above him can be read as a devil. It leans diagonally toward the centre, with a dark head and a sweeping, wing-like spread of red and black. Its angle works against the upright woman. Between them, Anthony appears pressed into a narrow pocket of space. The encounter is expressed through placement as much as through expression: the red form bears down, the woman rises, and the saint folds toward the ground.

A childlike figure stands just to the woman’s left. Other small figures cluster to her right and below. They complicate the scene’s scale. The group nearest the lower edge looks almost close enough to touch, while the central body appears taller and more remote. Cézanne does not provide a measured stage on which to arrange everyone. Feet, knees, heads, tree trunks and the draped cloth compete for the same small interval of ground.

Looking from left to right

The left edge begins in deep green foliage. A lighter branch or trunk interrupts it, but it does not open a clear route into a distant landscape. Near the bottom, Anthony’s robe seems to absorb several shades of brown, black and green. A patch of reddish earth slips out beside the lower figures. These colours keep the saint attached to the corner, even as his gesture directs attention toward the central apparition.

In the middle, blue and white paint shows through gaps around the raised cloth. The pale sky is not an empty backdrop: dark boughs and blue strokes cross it close to the woman’s head. Her lifted arms and the cloth make a shape that nearly repeats the branching forms at either side. That echo joins a human gesture to the wooded setting, while the bright cloth prevents her outline from being lost in it.

At the right, a tree rises behind the smaller bodies. Its dark trunk separates the group from the blue passage beyond, yet its branches also reach back toward the centre. The figures below appear to turn, crouch or reach in different directions. There is no single line of sight that links all of them to Anthony. Their activity makes the temptation feel like a surrounding spectacle rather than one person quietly facing another.

The lower edge is busy: a dark rounded form sits near the centre, with pale and brown shapes on either side. The compressed foreground offers little stable ground. Colour guides the eye instead, from Anthony’s robe to the red wing, down the white cloth and across the ochres and blues at right.

Cézanne’s brushwork helps hold this crowd together. Short touches of blue, green and white remain visible in the sky; darker patches build the trees and robe. No single object is finished in isolation from its neighbours. The woman’s contour is interrupted by nearby darks, and the red figure is made legible partly by the cool blue around it. The drama grows out of these contact points between forms.

Three treatments of Anthony

Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat discusses three separate Cézanne paintings on the subject: the Bührle canvas of about 1870, the Kasama canvas of about 1874, and this Orsay painting of about 1877. He stresses the uncertainty of dates for Cézanne’s early figure paintings. ^[3]

Jean Arrouye contrasts the Bührle canvas, with several nude women before a solitary saint, and the Orsay picture, where one standing woman dominates beneath a red devil. In his reading, her beauty intensifies a temptation the kneeling saint wishes to resist. This remains an interpretation of the encounter. ^[4]

Here the white cloth makes revelation an action inside the painting. It is lifted, rather than merely draped over a posed body. Anthony’s lowered posture offers an opposite movement. The two gestures make a small visual argument: one figure displays, the other recoils. Around them, the other bodies and the devil prevent that opposition from becoming a tidy pair. The saint is confronted by an entire scene.

Catalogue records preserve related studies, including a graphite study of a startled man and a sketch with words addressed to Anthony. Their dates overlap multiple painted versions; they do not establish a step-by-step plan for this canvas. ^[2]

Flaubert, tradition and uncertainty

Madeleine-Perdrillat proposes that Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine , published in 1874, may have influenced Cézanne. He also notes that Cézanne never names that book in his surviving letters. It remains a hypothesis for the Orsay painting of about 1877, and the publication date cannot alone explain the earlier canvas dated about 1870. ^[3]

Madeleine-Perdrillat also places these pictures within an older tradition of nude figures in landscape. The hermit’s encounter therefore need not be a literal illustration of Flaubert. The painting alone cannot establish which text, if any, Cézanne had open. ^[3]

A date, a title and a later journey

The catalogue dates the painting about 1877 but records earlier proposals of 1872–74 and 1873–77. A Vollard photograph bears Cézanne’s son’s annotation of about 1885. That annotation belongs to its dating history; it does not establish a precise year. The catalogue also lists Phantasie among its former titles. ^[2]

Orsay records its passage through the collections of Arsène Alexandre, Eugène Blot, Auguste Pellerin and Jean-Victor Pellerin. The French state accepted it in 1982 in settlement of inheritance tax, and it entered the museum collection as a dation . ^[1]