El camino sinuoso en Montgeroult

Cezanne painted this hillside in 1898, in the small village of Montgeroult northwest of Paris, and it was the last canvas he made there before going home for good to Aix-en-Provence in the south. He was about 59 and worked slowly, studying the motif a long while before each stroke. The houses come forward as clean ocher blocks, nearly geometric, while the trees around them stay loose and open, with bare canvas showing through in places. He was not after a pretty view. He wanted the underlying structure of what he saw, the way a landscape is put together, the very habit that younger painters would soon carry into Cubism. The road that gives the picture its name bends down the slope and then all but vanishes into the greenery, dissolved by the same brushwork that builds the walls.