Interpretive Resource

PAUL CÉZANNE (French 1839-1906)
House on the River, 1885/90
Oil on Canvas; 51.5 x 61 cm
Bequest of Joseph Winterbotham, 1954.304

One of Paul Cézanne’s major contributions was a heightened awareness that, for the artist, painting involves a personal struggle to find pictorial equivalents for what he or she wishes to represent, whether it is the natural world that so obsessed Cézanne or any of the many other subjects, both real and imaginary, that have occupied modern artists. Passionately engaged in this struggle, Cézanne developed a method of painting that became legendary. He constructed his pictures purpose-fully and doggedly, shuttling between the canvas and "the motif" (as Cézanne referred to his subject), making endless adjustments to the painted surface to bring it in line with what his mind and eye perceived in the scene before him. An unfinished picture such as House on the River is thus of special interest, not only because it has the appealing freshness of a drawing or watercolor, but also because it opens a door to the mysteries of the artist’s celebrated method, giving us valuable insights into the stages of the pictorial process leading up to his finished canvases.

Especially evident here is Cézanne’s habit of work-ing on most areas of the canvas at the same time, with the exception of the edges, which he sometimes left unfinished even in a canvas he considered final. This pic-ture also shows very clearly the building up of the sur-face through patches of color rhythmically applied in a manner that was much imitated by his admirers. A closer inspection reveals, however, that this characteris-tic application of paint encompassed a wide variety of brushstrokes. Quivering outlines delineate the tree trunks and branches. Wide, patchy strokes establish the broad masses of foliage, while blocks of color define the openings in the house and their reflections on the water’s surface. The color scheme is also modulated with great subtlety, as it progresses from the cool, shaded areas of the water and river bank, dominated by dark greens and browns, to the lighter, airier, partially sunlit areas of the foliage and house, treated in pale shades of blue or silvery green.

Structurally, the composition is largely determined by the parallel bands of water and riverbank. As is typical of Cézanne, their boundaries avoid the strict geometry of a rigidly parallel alignment: as the band of water widens toward the right, the riverbank narrows, following a gentle slope. Countering this horizontal emphasis are the verticals of the trees, which echo each other in their forked growth and taper upward, dissolving into the unpainted areas of the canvas. Although unfinished, there is a balance to the entire composition that reflects Cézanne’s constant concern with the internal dynamics of a picture, with maintaining at every stage of a picture’s development a condition of internal harmony between its different parts. This is one of the many ways in which Cézanne made visible one of modern art’s major tenets, that a work of art is not a servile reflection of the outside world, but an independent entity with its own laws, its own inner reality.