The turbulent and problematic work of Paul Cezanne's first decade as a painter has long been overshadowed by his legendary early history. The persona of a brash and intense Romantic that Cezanne created for himself contributed to critical dismissal of his early work as the chaotic and emotional outpouring of an unbridled imagination. Subsequent scholarship, both formalist and psychoanalytical in orientation, has tended to sustain this view, with the result that a unique and powerful body of work has seemed but the murky glimmering before Cezanne's introduction to Impressionism in 1872.

Mary Tompkins Lewis here assesses Cezanne'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.