Paul Cézanne loved the scene: the Bay of Marseille along the Mediterranean Sea from the vantage point of L’Estaque, a village where his mother rented a house. In the 1870s and 1880s, he painted it more than a dozen times. Each rendering is unique, but the series has tendencies, with the rooftops of buildings in the foreground, a blue bay in the middle distance, and highlands in the background. Several of the best examples soon will be on display at Tate Modern in London in a major retrospective of Cézanne’s work that is just concluding a stay at the Art Institute of Chicago—a place of perhaps more than casual interest, because Chicago also was the hometown of Ernest Hemingway, who saw at least one of these L’Estaque paintings as a young man and then went through life claiming, enigmatically, that the pictures of Cézanne helped him become a successful writer.¹

Nobody knows quite what to make of this professed influence.

Nobody knows quite what to make of this professed influence. The Cézanne exhibition in Chicago doesn’t even try: the gallery signage says nothing about Hemingway, nor does the catalogue print Hemingway’s name. One imagines this absence is because the question of Hemingway is peripheral to any serious discussion of Cézanne, who died in 1906, when Hemingway was seven years old. It may also be a wise dodge. Scholars who draw connections between Cézanne’s paintings and Hemingway’s prose risk stumbling into a bog of overinterpretation. More