Both the painting and the reported conversations of Cézanne suggest some connexions with psychoanalytic thought, particularly that of Marion Milner. The connexions are not a matter of individual biography but of the way, in general, painter and viewer are involved in a sense of the art of painting.

Cézanne's conversations emphasize the restraint and responsiveness which distinguishes pictorial from ordinary, non-pictorial, perception. In his paintings recognition of the depicted motif is sustained within numerous non-literal relations which that motif, when looked at for the purposes of painting, suggest to him. Sustaining those relations in turn amplifies and permeates recognition of the motif.