{"id":184022,"date":"2026-08-10T09:25:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T07:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/?post_type=product&p=184022"},"modified":"2026-08-10T09:26:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T07:26:13","slug":"the-mill-on-the-couleuvre-near-pontoise","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/en\/paul-cezanne\/the-mill-on-the-couleuvre-near-pontoise\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul C\u00e9zanne \u2013 The Mill on the Couleuvre near Pontoise"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Mill on the Couleuvre near Pontoise \u2013 a landscape you can check on the spot<\/h2>\n

A tall mill with a pale fa\u00e7ade and a steep ochre roof stands among greenery beside the water, a little left of the centre of the canvas. Below it lies a low wooden hut, and white ducks swim on the stream. A pinkish road runs along the whole lower edge, village roofs and a line of poplars stand to the right, and at the left edge two bare trunks rise into the sky. The hand-painted painting on canvas<\/strong> reproduces this work by C\u00e9zanne of 1881, which in the original measures 72.5 \u00d7 90 centimetres and is kept under inventory number A I 606 at the Alte Nationalgalerie<\/strong> in Berlin.<\/p>\n

The mill has a name, a street and is still standing<\/h3>\n

Most of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s landscapes are a view; this one is an address. The Berlin museum record names the building \u2013 it is le Moulin des \u00c9tannets<\/em>, one of many mills in this grain-milling district \u2013 names the street that according to the record probably runs behind it, the Rue des Deux Ponts<\/em>, and states that the structure survives today. The record goes further: in the strict frontal view the windows can be counted, and even the duck hut in the foreground can be recognised in an old photograph. The motif, the museum says, is rendered surprisingly faithfully, although the building appears strongly drawn up in height. That the canvas can be compared with the place is a habit of scholarship too: in the literature list for entry FWN 158 John Rewald<\/strong> appears three times \u2013 in C\u00e9zanne et Zola<\/em> (1936), in C\u00e9zanne, sa vie, son \u0153uvre<\/em> (1939) and in the magazine Art News<\/em> of 15 February 1944 \u2013 and each time the work is printed together with a photograph of the motif.<\/p>\n

Pissarro painted the same mill at least twice<\/h3>\n

The canvas was made during a half-year stay at Pontoise near Paris, close to the older friend Camille Pissarro<\/strong>, who a few years earlier had set C\u00e9zanne on the impressionist road. The museum notes that Pissarro painted this same watermill at least twice. The ducks are unusual in this body of work, because C\u00e9zanne otherwise excluded living creatures from his landscapes; the museum cautiously suggests that they may be a greeting to Pissarro, who loved everyday motifs. C\u00e9zanne revered him to the last: in a letter to \u00c9mile Bernard of 1905 he called him modest and colossal. In 2005 and 2006 the work was number 93 in the exhibition Pioneering Modern Painting: C\u00e9zanne & Pissarro 1865\u20131885<\/em> at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.<\/p>\n

From the colour seller to a Berlin museum<\/h3>\n

The first known owner is Julien Tanguy<\/strong> (1825\u20131894), a Paris dealer in artists\u2019 supplies \u2013 the canvas first belonged to the man who sold the paint. After him the museum record lists the painter Jacques-\u00c9mile Blanche<\/strong> (1861\u20131942), whom the catalogue raisonn\u00e9 leaves out of its own chain, then the poet and writer Robert de Bonni\u00e8res<\/strong> (1850\u20131905), and from 1890 to 1897 the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel<\/strong> in Paris. Precisely those years with the dealer were the subject of the exhibition Paul Durand-Ruel: Le Pari de l\u2019Impressionnisme<\/em>, held in 2014 and 2015 at the Mus\u00e9e du Luxembourg in Paris, where the work was listed as number 6.<\/p>\n

July 1897: a purchase and a gift at once<\/h3>\n

The canvas reached Berlin in July 1897, nine years before the painter died. Exactly how, the record states twice and each time differently. The provenance says the work was bought<\/em> for the Nationalgalerie by Hugo von Tschudi<\/strong> (1851\u20131911), art historian and director of the gallery; the acquisition field says instead that in 1897 it was the gift of a Berlin friend of the arts<\/em>, whose name, Wilhelm Staudt, stands only in brackets. The catalogue raisonn\u00e9 carries a third version: Gift of William Staudt<\/em>, with the first name anglicised. A purchase, a gift, an unnamed lover of art, a Wilhelm in brackets and an English William \u2013 for a single event in a single year. Why there are two forms neither the museum nor the catalogue explains, and we will not guess at it.<\/p>\n

Brussels, January 1890: the first exhibition<\/h3>\n

The museum text signed by Claude Keisch<\/strong> records that this work is among those C\u00e9zanne let out of his hands soon after they were made and allowed to be exhibited. The record confirms it: in January 1890 the canvas hung in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels at the exhibition of the group Les XX<\/strong>, as number 1, under the title Etude de Paysage<\/em>, lent by de Bonni\u00e8res. From February to April 1906 it was number 34 at the international exhibition of the Bremen Kunstverein, this time as Landschaft<\/em> and as a loan from the Royal National Gallery in Berlin.<\/p>\n

An exhibition whose title the record does not explain<\/h3>\n

Between 2 November 1958 and 12 April 1959 the canvas was number 131 in an exhibition at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin entitled Sch\u00e4tze der Weltkultur von der Sowjetunion gerettet<\/em> \u2013 treasures of world culture saved by the Soviet Union. It was listed there as Die M\u00fchle von Pontoise<\/em>. That is all the record says: the title of the exhibition, the dates, the number. Where the canvas was in the years before that show and how it came to be in it is not written in the sources before us, and so we shall not fill it in.<\/p>\n

What Berlin first called it<\/h3>\n

The museum bought a C\u00e9zanne early but named him cautiously. On 27 January 1898 Hans Mackowsky listed the work in the magazine Kunstchronik<\/em> among the gallery\u2019s new acquisitions, in column 198, as Freilichtstudie<\/em>, an open-air study. In the Catalogue of the Royal National Gallery in Berlin<\/em>, published by Max Jordan in 1901, it is entered on page 275 under number 743 as Landschaft, Studie<\/em> \u2013 landscape, study. Georges Rivi\u00e8re in 1923 called it Bourgade dans les arbres<\/em> and dated it to 1879. Only much later did the title that names the river and the town take hold. In 1996 and 1997 the work was number 59 in the exhibition Manet bis Van Gogh: Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is a quiet, middling-dark work tuned to green and ochre, which takes daylight and large walls well. We paint it in fifteen sizes, from 50 \u00d7 40 to 180 \u00d7 144 centimetres, intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher frame, and how it will look on the wall is shown in advance by our 3D application<\/strong>. Pissarro was also the first owner of the Still Life with Soup Tureen<\/a>, and from the same Oise valley come The House of the Hanged Man at Auvers-sur-Oise<\/a> and Turn in the Road at Auvers-sur-Oise<\/a>.<\/p>\n