Cézanne in Philadelphia and Everywhere Else

Within a half a mile in Philadelphia there are nearly ninety paintings of Cézanne, a tenth of his total output—the greatest concentration of his work in the world, with the Barnes Collection having 69 works. All one has to do is find the Schuylkill River—near the Belmont plateau in Fairmount Park… there, in the buildings, is Cézanne. We went to the Philadelphia Art Museum first to see the large Bathers painting, Cézanne’s last and biggest and reportedly “unfinished” canvas greets one from a distance, like Mont Sainte-Victoire, his noted mountain. The design of the museum highlights how central it is to the collection, as Rogier Van Der Weyden’s Crucifixion does on the other side of the museum—with one viewable from the far end of a corridor that goes through many rooms.