Cezanne's Banks of the Marne (Villa on the Bank of a River). Oil on Canvas. 1888. Between 1888 and 1890, Cezanne began to paint various river scenes. The River Marne was one of his favorites:
In a letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dated August 15th 1924 from Paris, Hemingway says:
"I have finished two long short stoires, one of them not much good and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I'm trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isn't writing a hard job though?"
Hemingway, Ernest. Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner Classics, 1981.
The short story that Hemingway refers to in this letter is The Big Two-Hearted River. He describes the fish:
"The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trouts keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistence of the log-driven piles of the bridge."
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