Naturalism in Painting

Here are two pictures that show this struggle and the distortions that arise from it:

He also points to the portrait of Gustave Geoffroy, suggesting: "The work table in his portrait of Gustave Geoffroy stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture. In giving up the outline Cézanne was abandoning himself to the chaos of sensations, which would upset the objects and constantly suggest illusions ..." (276). 

Merleau-Ponty insists, however, that the distortion in the table actually captures more effectively the way we ourselves perceive things; that is, to our natural vision of the "object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes" (278).

To emphasize this phenomenological point about different perspectives, it is helpful to look at the portrait of Mme Cézanne in a Yellow Chair in which the segment of the line behind her on the wall is dislocated, as it would be to natural vision. 

Merleau-Ponty summarizes why he thinks Cézanne is an important painter of the phenomenology of perception this way:

it is Cézanne's genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes" (278).