Avenue at Chantilly

Avenue at Chantilly (c.1888) at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio depicts the formal tree-lined avenues of the Chantilly estate — the great French country house north of Paris — during one of Cézanne's northern French working periods. Chantilly's formally designed landscape, with its geometric allées and architectural garden structures, provided an unusual subject for Cézanne: an already geometrically organized space rather than the organic Provençal landscape he more typically worked with. The Toledo Museum of Art, with a notable collection of European paintings from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, holds this as part of its French Post-Impressionist holdings. By 1888 his mature method was fully established, and the Chantilly avenue was subjected to the same parallel-stroke analysis he applied to the more rugged Provençal subjects. The formal garden allée also connects to his repeated return to the Jas de Bouffan chestnut allée as a compositional type.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.