The Temptation of St Antonius

At the far left of Cézanne’s The Temptation of St Antonius , a small, clothed figure stands beside a tree. Four much larger nude women occupy nearly everything else: one raises an arm beside him, one crouches near the bottom edge, one stands in the centre, and one reclines at the right. They do not form a tidy procession toward the saint. Their separate poses turn the wooded scene into a set of encounters that the eye must assemble.

The painting is the oil on canvas catalogued as FWN 611, or Rewald 167, and dated about 1870. It measures 57 × 76 cm and belongs to the Stiftung Sammlung E.G. Bührle in Zurich. ^{[1] [2]}

Start at the left edge

The saint is easy to miss on a quick view. His dark blue clothing merges with the trunks and shadows behind him; his pale face and hands give him away. He stands upright but does not command the centre. Immediately to his right a nude figure leans and turns, one arm lifted above her head. Her brighter body makes the transition from his narrow strip of space to the broad gathering of women. Between the two, Cézanne leaves little open ground. The figures are close, yet their outlines are not joined into a single action.

There is no visible barrier between them, but the tree at the extreme left cuts off an easy route out of the picture. The saint remains pressed into that edge. A broad dark hollow opens behind the women instead. This reversal makes the nominal subject peripheral and gives the visions room to expand. The title tells us whose ordeal we are seeing; the composition asks us to spend most of our time with what appears before him.

Four bodies, four directions

Near the lower centre a blonde woman crouches with her back and shoulder turned toward us. Pale blue or lavender colour lies across her body and the adjoining ground. Her head bends toward the right; an extended arm reaches into the darker passage beside the standing woman. At her feet are small pale forms that can be read as cloth or scattered objects. Their compressed shapes resist an exact inventory. What matters immediately is how the crouched figure draws the eye down from the upper bodies and sends it across the bottom of the canvas.

The woman at the centre supplies the painting’s strongest vertical. She stands with one hip forward and one arm lifted, her hand turned near a branch. A sweep of blue fabric hangs at her side and curls around her lower legs. The body is pale and warm against the nearly black green behind it. Cézanne has not isolated her on a clear stage: dark foliage presses close to the head, and the drape seems to continue into the surrounding shadows. Her raised hand points upward while the folds pull downward, so that the same figure connects the canopy with the foreground.

At right the fourth woman reclines across an ochre patch that could suggest a bank, cloth or vegetation. Her torso turns toward the viewer, but her face inclines left, back into the gathering. One leg travels diagonally toward the lower edge and ends in a small foot near the corner. The body fills a large area without becoming the painting’s sole focus. Her bright skin and the yellow ground compete with the standing woman’s blue drapery. Alternating warm and cool accents keep the eye moving between the two.

Each woman occupies a different angle. One lifts herself beside the saint, one folds toward the earth, one stands, and one reclines. These positions give the scene variety, but they also make its geography uncertain. The feet and knees suggest a shared foreground, while the dark space between the women offers few landmarks by which to measure their distances. Even the apparent ground changes colour beneath them. The bodies establish the place more decisively than any path, building or horizon could.

A wood with little daylight

Branches, leaves and trunks rim the upper part of the canvas. There are flashes of green, especially near the top left and top right, but no open sky large enough to set a time of day. The upper middle is notably dark. Around the figures, brown and green passages absorb some contours and sharpen others. A hand or shoulder appears clear for a moment, then a neighbouring edge becomes hard to follow. This uneven legibility makes a stationary group feel unsettled.

Look especially at the bottom edge. Dark brown earth does not extend as an even strip; it opens into pale shapes under the crouching figure and warmer colour below the reclining one. The figures almost touch that edge, so there is little empty foreground in which a viewer could imaginatively stand. The saint, although smaller, is the only person with a distinct patch of room to his left. That imbalance increases the feeling that the four nudes have surged into a confined space.

The story behind the title

The temptation of Anthony is an old subject about a hermit tested by visions. Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat notes that the early account by Athanasius describes demonic assaults and beasts, while nude women entered the subject’s imagery later. In his discussion of Cézanne’s paintings, he identifies this Bührle canvas as the first of three versions, followed by works usually placed around 1874 and 1877. ^[4]

Madeleine-Perdrillat proposes Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine as a possible literary connection, then points to a dating problem: Flaubert’s book appeared in 1874, later than the Bührle picture’s usual date of about 1870. He also notes that Cézanne does not name that book in his surviving letters. The connection remains a hypothesis; the title and painted figures alone cannot establish that Cézanne read this particular text before making this canvas. ^[4]

The Kasama Nichido Museum holds FWN 630, dated about 1874; the Musée d’Orsay holds FWN 650, dated about 1877. The Bührle canvas is FWN 611: its wide woodland has four large nudes and a small saint at left. ^{[4] [5]}

Dates, names and the painting’s later life

The dating has never been expressed as a single exact year. The online catalogue records both the current estimate of about 1870 and Venturi’s older 1867–69 range. It also records a photograph annotated “1873” by Cézanne’s son. That annotation is another historical date attached to the picture, rather than proof that the canvas was completed precisely in 1873. ^[1]

The Bührle collection records early ownership by Ambroise Vollard and Auguste Pellerin, then Alphonse Kann and later London and New York dealers. Emil Bührle acquired the canvas in March 1956; it entered the foundation in 1960. It is now recorded on long term loan at Kunsthaus Zürich as BU 0015. ^{[2] [3]}