Der Baum an der Biegung

Around 1881 Cézanne was spending time north of Paris, near Pontoise, often working beside the older painter Camille Pissarro, who had encouraged him for years. This landscape belongs to that stretch. A tree stands at a bend, and Cézanne builds the whole view out of small, repeated, roughly parallel strokes of the brush, a slow and deliberate way of laying paint down that he was still working out in these years. There is not much anecdote attached to the picture itself. It is one quiet study among the many landscapes he made trying to give solid, ordered structure to a plain patch of countryside.