Château des environs de Paris

Château des environs de Paris (Castle near Paris, 1888) at the Kunstmuseum Bern shows Cézanne during one of his periodic Paris-region stays applying his analytical method to the Île-de-France landscape. The châteaux and country houses of the Seine valley, built by the French nobility and prosperous bourgeoisie over several centuries, dotted the landscape between Paris and Versailles with a density of historical architecture quite different from the more isolated buildings of Provence. Cézanne's approach to these northern structures was the same as to the Provençal ones: the building's walls and roof analyzed as flat geometric planes of color, the surrounding trees and fields treated with the same systematic brushwork. His 1888 Paris-region stay coincided with several major developments in French avant-garde culture — the foundation of the Revue Wagnérienne, the emergence of Symbolist poetry, the beginnings of the Nabis group — and while Cézanne maintained his characteristic distance from all literary and theoretical movements, the Symbolist generation was beginning to understand his work as the bridge between Impressionism and their own aspirations.

Cézanne renders the château through his systematic construction: the building's architectural forms described through his constructive stroke, the surrounding landscape of trees and fields organized through carefully calibrated color relationships. His palette for the northern subject is cooler than his Provençal work — the specific grey-greens and blue-greys of the Île-de-France landscape under variable light. The château's specific architectural character is rendered through careful analysis of its planes and volumes.