La route (Le mur d’enceinte). The Road (The Old Wall)

Paul Cezanne submitted this view of Jas de Bouffan, his boyhood home near Aix, to the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877. From 1874 to 1877 the artist travelled repeatedly between Paris and his hometown in the south of France to seek inspiration in the region’s luminous skies and rich colours. Setting up his easel on the road just outside the eastern boundary of the inner compound of his parent’s rural estate, Cezanne directs the viewer’s attention to the jostling cluster of red-roofed farm buildings just beyond the property’s old stone wall. The true focus of this unconventional landscape painting, however, is the foliage on the branch of the elm tree located near centre of the canvas. Using spontaneously applied, wet-on-wet touches of vibrant colour, Cezanne captures the effect of autumnal daylight dancing on yellowing leaves. Foregrounding the Impressionist technique of using unblended brushwork to depict the fleeting effects of nature, Cezanne may have been responding to critics, who had castigated the group’s paintings as unfinished works and studies when they had their debut in Paris in the mid-1870s.

− 2024

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