Abandoned House near Aix-en-Provence

Abandoned House near Aix-en-Provence (1886) reflects Cézanne's interest in the derelict and disused structures that appeared throughout the Provençal landscape. He was not drawn to ruins for the picturesque associations they carried in the Romantic tradition — the melancholy of fallen civilizations, the sublime of historical decay. His interest was formal: a partially collapsed building offered different geometric relationships from an intact one, its broken walls and empty apertures creating a different set of formal problems for the painter to solve. The 1886 date places this canvas in the Gardanne period, when he was working intensively on the formal properties of Provençal architecture. The abandoned farm in this painting belongs to the broader pattern of agricultural change in the Provence of his time — the decline of traditional farming practices, the abandonment of marginal land — but Cézanne neither documents nor mourns this change. The Dallas Museum of Art holds this canvas as part of a collection built to represent the full range of Western European painting, and its Cézannes document several phases of his landscape production.

Cézanne renders the abandoned house with his characteristic systematic analysis: the wall planes and apertures of the ruined structure described through his constructive stroke, the encroaching vegetation handled through more varied marks. His palette for Provençal stone subjects is warm — the specific ochres and greys of local limestone, the terracotta of roof tiles (intact or collapsed), the blue-grey of the Provençal sky. The formal relationship between architecture and vegetation provides the compositional structure.