Description: landscape; architecture; outdoor; vegetation
Label Text: Cézanne painted this landscape during the summer of 1885 while visiting fellow artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who was the painting’s first owner. The painting depicts La Roche-Guyon, a picturesque village along the Seine outside Paris. Visible at left are the doors of dwellings carved into a chalk cliff, and above, the village’s medieval castle, summarily painted in rose-gray, block-like forms. Also clearly visible are the artist’s graphite underdrawings and large areas of primed, unpainted canvas, leading to the question of whether this is a finished work.
Whether or not the painting remains unfinished, it shows Cézanne definitively turning away from the loose brushwork of the Impressionists to forge a new, structural approach to painting based on a scaffold of planes and forms. Cézanne’s innovations laid the foundation for much of the avant-garde art of the early twentieth century.
Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1932.2 |