Cézanne has one thing in his favour which prepossesses us for him, _i.e._, his uprightness. It is his nature that ugliness has for him an attraction. He sees only what is abnormal, unpleasant, and repulsive in actual life. If he paints a house, it must be warped, and threaten to tumble down soon. If he portrays a human being, the latter has a distorted face, apparently paralysed on one side, and a deeply depressed or stupid expression. Every model that submits himself to him is put in some sort of convict’s dress. Here is a female portrait. A withered, dried-up face, mud-bedaubed clothes that look as if they had been trailed through the gutter. Doubtless a “professional” who at a raid was accommodated in “Black Maria,” and, after a night in the cells of the police station, discharged? Nothing of the sort. She is a respectable lady of the upper middle-class. This man with the trouble-distorted countenance and the greasy felt hat and overcoat is perhaps a starveling from Bohemia, a broken-down creature, ruined artist or writer? Most certainly not. He is a well-to-do person of independent means. It is curious to me how any one can allow himself of his own accord to be painted by Cézanne, unless it were done in a contrite, penitential mood as a penance. To be sure, one cannot be angry with him, for he does not treat himself any better than his other victims. He has painted portraits of himself which would be grossly libellous if another had painted them. In truth he is not vain, for he sees himself as he represents himself in these pictures. And his morose eye disfigures not only faces, heads, and raiment, but also the rest. Heine assures us that “A woman’s body is a poem.” He would not dare to sustain this statement if he were to see Cézanne’s “Three Naked Women before the Bath.” Such nudities are really immoral, and shriek, not for a discreet fig-leaf, but for a nine-fold covering of cloth and fur.