La Route tournante à La Roche-Guyon

La Route tournante à La Roche-Guyon (The Winding Road at La Roche-Guyon, 1885) at the Smith College Museum of Art depicts a Seine valley village that Monet also painted in 1880. The comparison is instructive: Monet's La Roche-Guyon canvases were celebrations of the luminous, atmospheric qualities of the Seine valley — the castle on the chalk cliff, the river below, the light transforming everything into color sensation. Cézanne's approach was fundamentally different, as it always was in relation to his Impressionist contemporaries. The winding road through the village interested him for its compositional possibilities — the curve as a device for tracking space through the picture plane — rather than for the historical associations of the castle or the atmospheric beauty of the river. The Smith College Museum, one of the strongest American college art collections, holds this canvas alongside other significant European and American works that document the transmission of modern French painting to the United States.

The winding road organizes the composition through its serpentine movement — the road's curve carrying the eye through the picture plane and into depth. Cézanne describes the road's surface and its edges through his constructive stroke, while the surrounding village and landscape are rendered through his characteristic modulated color. His palette for the Seine valley subject is cooler than his Provençal work — the grey-greens of northern France — but the systematic approach to form and space is identical across different geographical subjects.