Road leading to the lake

Around 1880 Cezanne was in his early forties and had stopped sending work to the Impressionist shows he had joined a few years before. The quick Impressionist touch no longer gave him what he wanted, a landscape that held together like architecture. You can watch him working it out here. At first glance it is an ordinary scene, a dirt road curving between trees toward a strip of water, with sheaves of cut corn standing in the field. Look longer and the depth stops behaving. The low bushes, the far edge of the lake and the line of hills all stack up as flat horizontal bands, while the paint arrives in short parallel strokes, each patch its own measured colour. Painters who saw this later, among them Gauguin and Signac, carried the lesson toward flatter, built-up pictures of their own. The corn sheaves give the season away, late summer in the French countryside, the harvest already in.