Landscape near Paris

In April 1876 the Impressionists opened their second exhibition in Paris, in a gallery on the rue Le Peletier, and Cézanne was not in it. He had shown with them in 1874 and would show again in 1877, but that year he stayed away, and he was selling almost nothing. This canvas dates from about that time, a flat green field with a line of roofs and two trees along the horizon. By 1899 it was in Florence, owned by Egisto Fabbri, an American-born collector who wrote to Cézanne that year to tell him he owned 16 of his paintings. Fabbri's collection eventually reached 32. This one left Italy through a Paris dealer, went to the American collector Chester Dale in 1927, and came to Washington with the rest of Dale's collection in 1963.