In a letter to a friend in 1897, Paul Cézanne wrote, “Art is a harmony parallel with nature.”
The town of Montgeroult where Cézanne completed this painting a year later in 1898 is built into a hillside with dramatic, vertical views. Painting from direct observation, Cézanne captures the cresting street as the buildings begin to recede into rising trees.
In Ferme à Montgeroult (Farm at Montgeroult), we find Cézanne later in his career where he builds his landscapes through directional brushwork while reducing forms into bold lines and shapes. The artist balances perspective and flatness while unifying the composition with interlocking brushstrokes.
“The writer expresses himself through abstractions,” Cézanne would later write, “whereas the painter is concrete through line and color, his feelings, his perceptions.”
Born in Aix-en-Provence, France, Cézanne spent his childhood exploring the rugged countryside outside the southern city.
Cézanne developed his skills studying and copying the work of the Old Masters, including Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens, at the Louvre Museum after moving to Paris at the age of 21.
A necessary but discomfited change for the young artist, he captured the capital city through solemn portraits and scenes of rape and murder with dark opaque colors and aggressive strokes applied with a palette knife. These paintings were continuously rejected by the official Salon exhibitions in Paris through the 1860s.
It was not until the guidance and influence of Camille Pissarro that Cézanne began his return to nature – both in his work and life. With an emphasis on observation, color, and light, Cézanne would unite the approach of the Impressionists and the structure of classic compositions from the masters he studied at the Louvre.
Cézanne’s unique method, which pushed the boundaries of perspective and what a painting could capture, influenced the next generation of artists – particularly Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s creation of Cubism – as well as others who would become the foundation of Modernism.
“Someone else will accomplish what I have not been able to do,” the artist said. “I am probably only the primitive of a new art.”
