Paul Cezanne, 'The Avenue at the Jas de Bouffan', 1868-70, possibly later

Cezanne made this painting in the large, shady garden of his father’s country house, just outside Aix-en-Provence. It shows the view down one of the main paths, framed by an avenue of chestnut trees. Despite the domestic setting, the artist injected a distinct sense of drama.

Firstly, he simplified the view, reducing it to clear planes. Emphatic horizontal lines run across the canvas, contrasting the powerful verticals of the trunks with the strong diagonal of the path leading through the chestnuts. This takes us deep into the picture. Cezanne compressed the view so that we cannot see the tops of the trees, increasing our sense of their height.

Secondly, the artist added clear contrasts between the blocks of colours, especially the different greens and yellows. He aimed to recreate the effect of a bright summer’s day. The powerful glare of the Provençal sun bleaches out colour and the shade intensifies it. He also used separate building blocks of colour at a more detailed level, sometimes applying the paint using a palette knife rather than a brush. For example, one may notice how he has suggested the chestnut leaves in the foreground.

Louis-Auguste Cezanne, the artist’s father, bought the 15-hectare estate of Jas de Bouffan in 1859. It included a small farm, vineyards and a garden that was laid out like a formal park with avenues of trees and a rectangular pool. The family residence was a large, three-storey, seventeenth-century house. Cezanne did not inherit the estate until his father died in 1886. Still, he stayed there often and adapted one of the north-facing attics into a studio.

But it was the shady views and avenues of the small park that surrounded the house which were the greatest inspiration to Cezanne, and he made many paintings there. Some show the house in the view, while others include the pool. In this painting you can see the water reeds in the lower right-hand corner. He had been inspired from an early age to paint en plein air. In the autumn of 1866, when he was still only 26, he wrote in a letter to the novelist Émile Zola, his childhood friend from Aix: ‘Pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside. When out-of-doors scenes are represented, the contrast between the figures and the ground is astounding and the landscape is magnificent. I see some superb things, and I shall have to make up my mind only to do things out-of-doors.’

Unfortunately, Cezanne did not date the painting. It has proved difficult to gauge when it was made because it has characteristics that are associated with his early work in the 1860s and also later periods. Scholars have made suggestions ranging from 1867 to 1875, but the most likely date is probably about 1868–70. While it could be later than 1870, it is thought that Cezanne was away from Aix between the autumn of 1871 and the summer of 1874.