Arbres et rochers

Arbres et rochers (Trees and Rocks, c.1900) at the Dixon Gallery in Memphis belongs to the late series in which Cézanne investigated the rocky terrain and woodland of the Bibémus quarry area. The quarry, an ancient source of the golden ochre limestone used in Aix's historic buildings, offered him a landscape of warm cut stone faces, twisted pine trees, and accumulated rock debris that combined the geometric and the organic in a single subject. He rented a cabin at the quarry from 1895 and worked there over several years, producing canvases and watercolors that are among his most formally complex landscape investigations. The combination of the warm, angular quarry stone — cut into the hillside in rough planes — with the organic, sinuous forms of the pines growing between the rocks was exactly the visual situation his method was developed to analyze. The Dixon Gallery in Memphis, with its specialized focus on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work, holds this late Cézanne as one of its most significant holdings.

The interplay between the organic forms of trees and the geometric character of rock faces is Cézanne's central formal interest here — tree trunks rendered with curved strokes, rock surfaces with straighter, more angular marks. The palette of grey-greens, ochres, and warm pinks is characteristic of the Bibémus quarry landscape in Provençal light.