In his early years in Paris, in addition to a few isolated portraits and landscapes, Cézanne mainly painted serious, gloomily executed scenes of temptation, murder, and abduction. The Pastorale also has the characteristic features of Cézanne's early work: in unreal moonlight, three naked women and three clothed men are on a river bank. The painting can be interpreted as the young artist's personal response to Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which scandalised the Parisian art world in 1863.
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