Campagnes de Bellevue (Fields at Bellevue)

Campagnes de Bellevue (c.1892) at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is one of the most characteristic examples of Cézanne's Bellevue landscape paintings — broad, open views of the Aix plain with the distant silhouette of Mont Sainte-Victoire visible on the horizon. The Phillips Collection, assembled by Duncan Phillips from the 1920s, was among the first American institutions to acquire Cézanne seriously and to place his work within the context of an evolving tradition of coloristic abstraction reaching from El Greco through Daumier and Delacroix to the Post-Impressionists. This broad view of agricultural land organized into overlapping color planes demonstrates Cézanne's mature approach to the open Provençal landscape — without the dramatic natural features of the quarry subjects or the compositional anchors of the Jas de Bouffan, the view tests his ability to create formal interest through color temperature relations alone. The Phillips Collection's Cézanne holdings, including the Card Players, make it one of the most important American institutional resources for understanding his figure and landscape work together.

Cézanne organizes the landscape in overlapping planes of color, with his characteristic diagonal parallel strokes creating both texture and spatial recession. The warm ochres of the fields are contrasted with cooler blue-greens in the foliage. The composition is built through accumulated marks rather than drawn contours.