Cezanne's Watercolors, Guided by Light

His painting is still more abstract. All you see at first is a sea of tinted patches often overlapping. As your eye proceeds from left to right, Cezanne's formless patches begin to take on shape, turning into triangles that rhyme with one another.

Provence doesn't look like that. Cezanne's trick is metaphoric. He doesn't show the streamside rocks, or the weeds that grow between the rocks, or the surface of the water, and yet you sense the cragginess, the smoothness of the water, the thickness of the shrubbery, the moisture in the air.

How did he do it? How did Cezanne wrangle that trembling of pencil lines, and that strew of pointed patches, and make these so obedient to the spirit of the place, to its coolness and its shadows, that you know that you are there?

The answer lies, I think, in the ferocity of his looking. The subordinate marks Cezanne deployed, the color stains, the pencil lines, do not in themselves represent anything. They don't depict this rock, that leaf, nor do they veer off into prettiness. They're ruthlessly controlled by an overarching vision. They're there to conjure -- without copying -- the whole scene before his eyes.

"I keep coming back to this," he wrote. "The painter must dedicate himself totally to the study of nature."

When he studied the familiar scene just outside his door, he did so with the same intensity. "Pistachio Tree in the Courtyard of the Chateau Noir," circa 1900, is from the Art Institute of Chicago. His method is the same. The branches of the trees display the same familiar stuttering of pencil lines. And yet you see -- and know -- the tree line in the background, and the smoothness of the wall, and the weight of those cut stones. You can almost feel the mistral, the wind of Provence, sweeping through the trees and beating down the bushes. You can feel it in the background trees, it sets their branches swaying. An angled stroke above them places in the landscape the monumental roughness of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Roughness pleased Cezanne. He dressed roughly, there were paint stains on his jacket. He smelled of garlic. He never lost his country accent. But don't be misled. Cezanne was no rube. He read closely and widely. He'd been a student of the law. He was versed in Greek and Latin, and would translate, for the fun of it, an idyll of Theocritus. Few painters of his time had a better education.

What he disliked was the polished. Academic art distressed him. Cezanne thought the suave smoothness of the art of J.A.D. Ingres "pernicious." His own roughness was intentional.

He was proud to seem a primitive -- "a primitive," he wrote, "of the way I have discovered."

Examining his way, deciphering his method, may seem, at first, a useful way of entering his art, but it will not take you far. Cezanne was no logician. The National Gallery's Conisbee, who put together this majestic exhibition, calls Cezanne "a total sensualist. His art is all about sensations."

It's a tingling responsiveness to the landscape of Provence, to those reddish rocks, those swaying trees, the thinness of the air, that calls his markings into harmony and holds his art together.

Cezanne's pictures don't work swiftly. They require concentration. The longer you look, the more his watercolors give you. Every stroke of graphite, every touch of paint, is present for a reason. And the longer you look, the more the painter's roughness begins to seem a sweetness, an energizing sweetness that simultaneously suffuses both your vision and your mind.

Cezanne in Provence will remain in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art through May 7. The museum, at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, is open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free. For information call 202-737-4215 or visit http://www.nga.gov/ .