The Big Tree

In 1931 the dealer Paul Guillaume showed a group of Derain's recent landscapes at his Paris gallery, and this canvas, painted around Saint-Maximin in Provence in 1929 or 1930, was one of them. That same year it crossed the Atlantic for the Carnegie International, the big annual exhibition in Pittsburgh. In 1933 it went to New York, to the Durand-Ruel galleries, for an exhibition Guillaume organized himself. It shows a great tree in the midday sun, with slimmer trunks beside it and blue hills far off. The museum finds Cézanne in the choice of greens and oranges. Light arrives in small touches of yellow and dabs of creamy white, brightest on the pale forked trunk, while the branches are drawn with long, dark strokes. Derain once said that the life of a tree was a mystery no painter had ever managed to solve.