The Road

This landscape dates to about 1871, the year France stumbled out of its war with Prussia. Cezanne had sat the fighting out down south, near Marseille at L'Estaque, well clear of the draft, and he came back to painting a country still counting its losses. You can read that mood in the handling. The paint is dark and thickly laid, the greens going almost to black, the road driven on with a loaded brush rather than carefully described. This is Cezanne a year or two before the change that would lighten everything, when he moved north and learned to open up his color. Here the weight is all downward and earthbound, the kind of picture a young man makes when he cares more about mass than about light. The pale band of the road does the real work, cutting up through the dark ground toward a low, plain horizon.