Intérieur de forêt

Around 1885 Cézanne was working in the wooded hills east of Aix-en-Provence, ground he came back to for the rest of his life. He was 46 and close to invisible as a painter. He had not shown with the Impressionists since 1877 and would sit out their last exhibition in 1886. A sous-bois, a forest interior, offers a painter nothing easy. There is no sky, no horizon and no distance to fall back on, only trunks and rock and whatever light gets through. Cézanne returned to the motif again and again in these years, building depth out of overlapping planes instead of receding space. The canvas is small, 46 by 56 centimetres. It reached the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1996, given by her family in memory of Saidye Rosner Bronfman.