In Portrait of Hemingway, Lillian Ross describes her trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Ernest Hemingway and his son, Patrick. After looking, for several minutes, at Paul Cezanne's painting, Rocks-- Forest of Fontainebleau, Hemingway states, "This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over. Cezanne is my favorite painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter" (60). Cezanne had a significant influence on Hemingway and his writing. This influence has been acknowledged in Hemingway's own work as well as in various interviews and articles. Hemingway was introduced to Cezanne's work in the rue de Fleurus studio during his regular visits to Gertrude Stein when she served as a mentor to him. There were two of Cezanne's paintings in the studio, and Stein had her own "indebtedness" to Cezanne involving her theories of structure in writing.1 Cezanne was practically a hero to Hemingway who wanted to "write stories as objective and real as the paintings of Cezanne, to do the country as Cezanne had done it."2 Neither Hemingway nor Lillian Ross ever gives any explanation as to what "this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over" means. It is never explained what, in the painting, it is he is referring to. What is it, exactly, that we "try to do in writing?" What is it about Cezanne's work that allows Hemingway to point at a canvas and, for all practical purposes, say, "this is the way I strive to write?"

Rocks-- Forest of Fontainebleau is a landscape. Many connections can be made between Hemingway's and Cezanne's treatment of landscape. Emily Stipes Watts, in Ernest Hemingway and the arts, names four main methods in Cezanne's painting that Hemingway is able to transpose into words. The first is the "use of a series of planes for depth and structural development" (32). The second technique is that he never allowed the distant mountains in a landscape to become lost or "hazy" and was still able to clarify their position in space. The third technique of Cezanne's was his "emphasis upon volumes of space with the use of simple geometrical forms as the basis of definition." And, finally, Cezanne let color mold and define form rather than light and shade (34).
Watts applies each of these to Hemingway's own description of landscape. She explains that Hemingway's landscapes exist as a series of spatial planes. She points out that the while a writer may not be able to outline the distant ridge of mountain with a paintbrush, Hemingway's "distant mountains" maintain their position in space due to his use of specific, contrasting color (34). Solidity and volume, likewise, are of primary importance in Hemingway's landscapes. Lastly, Watts argues that Hemingway rarely describes his landscape in terms of light and shade, but utilizes color, just as Cezanne does (35).
Hemingway and Cezanne's affinity, however, cannot lie solely in artfulness of landscape description. There must be something more significant underlying the careful craftsmanship of each artists' landscape. Hemingway's landscape, of course, is heavily nuanced with something else, a something more. According to Watts, the "something more" that they share within these four techniques, points to a permanence or an order or form outside of man --the absence of chaos.3 This link is important but, perhaps, it is limiting to only link these two masters by landscape.