This painting probably depicts a scene outside the grounds of the château de Marcouville, very close to Pontoise. Cézanne's interest in this landscape may be linked to the fact that his friend Camille Pissarro had already painted there five years earlier. However the comparison stops there. The patient search for gentle solutions typical of Pissarro seems far removed from this painting imbued with powerful energy.
Cézanne was interested in the clump of tall trees on the banks of the Viosne. The difficulty was in making this landscape of greenery "readable". To this end, he contrasted the rectilinear aspect of the poplars with the confused mass of the other trees. Between the slanting brushstrokes, characteristic of this period, the white background filters through almost everywhere, bringing luminosity and animation to the surface of the painting.
Clearly Cézanne was seeking to overcome the technical difficulty of representing a view where the only motif was foliage. The difference between this wooded landscape and those of the Barbizon school is significant. Cézanne, like Pissarro, represented trees that had been planted by man rather than those that grew "naturally". He therefore introduced into his paintings signs of human activity organising the landscape, rather than Nature's anarchic growth.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj9sHjK7IVk
This is a sketch I worked on Friday jun 14. I would love to post these daily vids but I can’t seem to get them out in a consistent time. So I have to work in them ahead of time so when I post it post at similar times.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoTmjjqzgJQ
Leaning on a fabric-covered table and resting her head in her hand, this young woman looks out with an enigmatic expression. Since the Renaissance, artists have used this pose to portray melancholy. The pose, combined with her hauntingly unreadable face, gives a human poignancy and psychological tension to the figure. Juxtaposing bold, individual strokes of color, Paul Cézanne built up the woman's powerful physical presence and the space she occupies. As a twentieth-century painter and admirer of Cézanne observed, his later works, such as Young Italian Woman have "an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting, through his use of colors." While the woman's form is convincing, the space behind and around her can appear contradictory and even confusing. How far away is the wall? Is the tabletop flat underneath the cloth? Does she sit or stand? These questions give tension and movement to an otherwise stable composition. From the 1890s until the end of his life, Cézanne painted a number of these grand figure studies, usually relying upon local workers or residents for his models.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ctjw3p8Vc