Bend in a Road in Provence

This first large landscape painted by Paul Cézanne depicts his native region, Aix-en-Provence. At the time he painted this work, Cézanne was living in Paris, where he befriended such artists as Camille Pissarro, who would later become leaders of the Impressionist movement. Although Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists, his use of the spatula to smooth broad areas of paint recalls the work of Gustave Courbet; the unique method of painting he developed set him apart from his peers. This bold composition, with its construction of form built from large areas of colour, foreshadows the artist’s later experiments with depth and perspective for which he is best known, and which ultimately made him one of the most influential artists of his generation.