Brief Report
In 1913, six years after Cézanne’s death, this landscape, together with seven other works by Cézanne, was exhibited at the Secessionshaus in Berlin. The gallery-owner and publisher Paul Cassirer had acquired this work from Cézanne’s art-dealer Ambroise Vollard [Rewald 1996, Vollard photo archive no. 302] (fig. 5). As we can see in part from inscriptions and stickers verso, previous owners such as the writer Erich Maria Remarque and Margarete Oppenheim, as well as the Cézanne expert Walter Feilchenfeldt feature in the illustrious provenance of the painting (fig. 2).
The motif of the plain of Bellevue attracted the artist time and again, as his sister had a property there. Two further pictures were painted in the following years [Rewald 1996, incl. nos. 716, 717] and only recently has a relationship been demonstrated between this and a watercolour in a private collection [Schaefer/Saint-George/Lewerentz 2008, pp. 150f.] (fig. 12).
As in the other Provençal landscape in the collection of the Fondation Corboud at the Wallraf museum, which dates from a few years earlier (Dep. FC 657), here too the artist used a study-grade canvas, known in the trade as toile étude or toile pochade (fig. 6). The loosely woven, fragile picture-support led to early lining. Cézanne chose the standard F25 size, according to Rewald one of the most frequent canvas sizes in his œuvre [Rewald 1996, vol. 1, p. 16 ].
The artist captured all the details of the later painterly execution in a compositional lay-in (fig. 7) which took the form of a drawing both in charcoal and in blue paint applied using a fine brush. These preliminaries were then largely covered over by countless strokes over almost the whole of the sur- face, applied with fine tongue-shaped hair brushes (figs. 10, 11); this very careful, well-considered and almost pernickety brushwork occupied a number of working sessions. The analytically dissected pictorial elements that characterize this work are thus intermeshed in dense applications of paint (fig. 9).
Paul Cézanne
Landscape in the West of Aix-en-Provence, 1885/88, oil on canvas, 65.3 x 81.5 cm, WRM 3188
Paul Cézanne
born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence,
died on 22 October 1906 ibidem
Fig. 02
Verso, lined
Fig. 03
UV fluorescence
Fig. 04
Transmitted light
Fig. 05
Detail, label of the packing company J. Chenue, which identifies the painting as being in the possession of the
art-dealer Cassirer
Fig. 06
Detail under raking light, showing plain quality of canvas
Fig. 07
Mapping of the findings regarding charcoal underdrawing (marked in red) with detail, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 08
Second phase of work: blue underdrawing with paintbrush, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 09
Detail, heavily concentrated applications of paint in echelon
Fig. 10
Detail, correction by a number of superimposed paint
applications
Fig. 11
Meticulous technique: greenish-yellow, wet-in-wet brush-stroke accentuates existing red highlight, microscopic
photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 12
Paul Cézanne, The Plain of Bellevue, 1885/88, drawing and
watercolour on paper, h 30.4 x b 47.3 cm, private collection