The chapter explores the visual phenomenologies of William Faulkner and Paul Cézanne through an analysis of their philosophical, temperamental, and technical commonalities. The chapter argues that these features of the art practices of Faulkner and Cézanne extended throughout their careers and focuses on some of Cézanne’s paintings and the early works Faulkner wrote in Paris, specifically the short story “A Portrait of Elmer” (written in 1925, reworked in 1930s and published in 1979). The chapter also makes the case that Faulkner and Cézanne shared an insular temperament and a marked antipathy to many of the artistic and social conventions associated with Paris, which contributed to the evolution of several important philosophical and technical commitments that shaped their developments. Utilizing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Cézanne, the chapter further details some of the features shared by the visual phenomenologies of both the writer and the artist: a view of art’s parallel relationship to an independent nature, a visual and hermeneutical difficulty and an aesthetics of the unfinished, and the imbrication of synaesthetic strands of visual and nonvisual environmental stimuli in their works. The reading of “A Portrait of Elmer,” that ends the chapter, takes up, in addition to all these philosophical considerations, Faulkner’s exploration of an attitude to sexuality and gender which finds its genesis in this early text but with which Faulkner would grapple for the remainder of his career.