La strada per Pontoise

By 1875 Cezanne had spent the better part of two years working beside the older painter Camille Pissarro in the countryside north of Paris, around Pontoise and Auvers. Pissarro set him up outdoors, in front of the motif, and talked him out of the dark, thickly loaded canvases of his early years. You can see the lesson taking here. The paint is drier and broken into small strokes, the greens and ochres of an ordinary country road built up patch by patch rather than dramatised. Cezanne kept the discipline but not the softness. Where Pissarro dissolved a scene into weather, Cezanne was already pressing the trees and the road into firmer blocks, sorting the world into planes he could hold in place.