Description
The Bridge over the Marne at Créteil – one canvas, four Moscow institutions
The lower half of the canvas is taken up by still water in which trees, bridge and houses are reflected vertically; the reflection is painted at the same density as the thing it reflects. Above it a stone arched bridge spans across, and behind the bridge rise tall green trees and a few houses with reddish roofs. The sky is white and blue, with no clouds in any real sense. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s work of about 1894, which measures 71 × 90 centimetres in the original and is held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Four museums, one city
The provenance of this canvas ends with a run of institutions that follow one another in the same city. On 22 January 1912 the Moscow collector Ivan Morozov bought it. In 1918 it is recorded as belonging to the First Museum of Modern Western Painting in Moscow, in 1923 to the State Museum of Modern Western Art, and in 1948 the Pushkin Museum takes it over. Four names in thirty years, and the canvas did not leave Moscow in that time. How and why those institutions succeeded one another the record does not say, and we will not supply it; the names and the years are what stand.
From Vollard to Morozov
Before Moscow the canvas belonged to the dealer Ambroise Vollard in Paris. In January 1900 Auguste Pellerin bought it; on 8 September 1911 it passed to the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune – and the same day back to Vollard. Only from Vollard did it go to Morozov in January 1912. Vollard therefore appears twice in the chain, and Pellerin is one of those collectors who turn up often in the history of Cézanne’s canvases.
Three hundred and fifty francs
In Vollard’s stockbook this work carries the number 3469 and the price of 350 francs, with the measurement 73 × 92 centimetres – a few centimetres more than the catalogue raisonné gives. The date of 8 September 1911 is worth noting too: the canvas went to Bernheim-Jeune and returned to Vollard on that one day, which means a transaction between trading houses rather than a sale to a collector.
Paris 1895, St Petersburg 1912, Moscow 1926
In November and December 1895 the canvas was in the exhibition of Cézanne’s works at the Galerie Vollard in Paris. In January 1912 it appears in St Petersburg in the centennial exhibition of French art, in the Yusupov mansion at 42 Liteiny Avenue. In 1926 it was in Moscow in Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh at the Museum of Modern Western Art as number 11. In 1936 it travelled back to Paris, to the Musée de l’Orangerie, as number 74 with plate XXVI and under the title Le Pont de Créteil, lent by Moscow; in 1937 it was there again for the World’s Fair.
Water that weighs as much as the bank
What is unusual about this canvas is the relation between its two halves. The reflection in the water is painted no softer and no lighter than the thing above it, but with the same density of paint and the same strokes; the vertical lines of the trees continue into the water without breaking. Because of this the lower half does not look like water but like a second, inverted landscape. The bridge across the middle is the one horizontal element dividing the two halves – and it is that dividing line which holds the work together.
What Vollard entered beside number 3469
The dealer’s description is for once long, and lists exactly what is on the canvas: huile; les bords de la Marne; au 1r plan de l’eau où se reflètent les paysages, arbres, pont, maisons; ciel blanc et bleu – oil; the banks of the Marne; in the foreground water in which the landscape, trees, bridge and houses are reflected; sky white and blue. Vollard therefore noticed for himself what matters in this work: that the reflections are listed as objects in their own right. The catalogue names among the locales Créteil and the Marne, and among the motifs the river, the water’s edge, the bridge and the houses.
This is a calm, horizontal canvas with a great deal of green and blue, suited to a room where the work should settle things – a bedroom, a study or a hallway. Fifteen sizes are on offer, from 55 × 43 to 180 × 142 centimetres, all measurements in centimetres, intermediate measurements made to order, and the effect on the wall is shown by our 3D application. From northern France come The House of the Hanged Man at Auvers-sur-Oise and Turn in the Road at Auvers-sur-Oise, and on the water stands The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque.
- Subject: The Bridge over the Marne at Créteil, Paul Cézanne, about 1894, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: between 1918 and 1948 the canvas belonged to four different Moscow institutions without leaving the city
