The Road in Provence

By the early 1890s Paul Cezanne had largely withdrawn from Paris and the Impressionist circle and was working almost alone in his native Provence, around Aix. This hillside belongs to those years. The wall of angular, jutting rock may be a quarry, its cuttings laying bare the geological strata underneath, and that exposed structure is exactly what drew him. Cezanne cared less for a pretty view than for how the ground is built, and he assembles the slope here from blunt, overlapping planes of ochre, grey and green. The exact spot has never been firmly identified, somewhere in the dry country he had known since boyhood. Even the scattered trees are handled as facets rather than soft foliage, so the whole hillside reads as one worked surface of stone.