In disconnected yet overlapping lives and complementary art forms, Henry James and Paul Cézanne traced the move from form to chaos, from structure to entropy, from certainty to uncertainty that marked the West’s entrance into the modern world. As we read an early, a mid-phase, and late novel from Henry James, we’ll use Cézanne’s art from roughly the same time periods to help us understand this fundamental shift: from sturdy optimism to exuberant pessimism, from the hopes of empire to the loss of all we know in the mud of Somme.