Publisher's Synopsis
Mary Tompkins Lewis here assesses Cézanne's first works as a whole, with particular emphasis on the subject paintings, and finds them to be stylistically and iconographically coherent. Lewis views the body of early work not as rudimentary efforts giving unschooled shape to the artist's emotions, but as informed and complex reworkings of traditional subjects, styles, and techniques, suffused with the defiant imagination of a burgeoning master.