Forest Interior

Two catalogues of Cézanne's paintings, published 60 years apart, disagree about when this one was made. Lionello Venturi, who compiled the first in 1936, placed it in the early 1880s. John Rewald, in the catalogue that came out in 1996, moved it to 1897 or 1898, and the current catalogue raisonné keeps the later date. That is a gap of well over a decade. Thin trunks stand in parallel like posts, the foliage is laid down in short patches of muted green, blue and brown, and the dark strokes of the underdrawing were never covered, so you can still trace them through the paint. Cézanne did not sign it. A New York gallery showed it in 1940 under the name L'Orée du Bois, the edge of the wood, and in 2018 it entered the collection of Hasso Plattner, the co-founder of the software company SAP.