Petites maisons à Pontoise

Cézanne came north to Auvers in the autumn of 1872 and stayed about 18 months, working beside Camille Pissarro in the Oise valley. The two of them went out to the same motifs, and the cluster of houses in this picture turns up in a Pissarro canvas as well. Pissarro described the arrangement plainly years later, saying he had influenced Cézanne at Pontoise and Cézanne had influenced him, and that each of them kept the only thing that counted, his own sensation. Where they part company is easiest to see in the thick beige strips across the middle distance. They stand for rows of planting, and they also sit on the surface as paint, refusing to settle into the field. Harvard has had the picture since 1934, from the bequest of the Chicago collector Annie Swan Coburn.