Paisagem perto de Melun

Cezanne painted this from the countryside around Melun, south-east of Paris, where he settled for about a year between 1879 and 1880. He was in his early forties and keeping his distance from the Paris art world, living quietly and working through the problem that would occupy the rest of his life, how to give a landscape the solidity of something built. You can watch him laying the fields and trees down in firm parallel strokes, each patch of colour set beside the next like courses of stone, so the view feels constructed rather than glimpsed. He had shown with the Impressionists a few years earlier but was already moving past their fleeting light toward something steadier. This stretch of ordinary farmland was the kind of unremarkable ground he preferred to test it on.