Landscape near Paris

Landscape near Paris, painted around 1876 and now at the National Gallery of Art, belongs to the period when Cézanne was making extended stays in the Paris region between longer retreats to Provence. He was working alongside Pissarro in the Pontoise area, absorbing the lessons of Impressionist light and atmosphere while beginning to push beyond them. The Île-de-France landscape offered him a different set of visual problems from Provence: softer light, more atmospheric moisture, the flat agricultural terrain of the Seine valley rather than the dramatic rocky formations of the Midi. His willingness to treat the unremarkable northern French countryside with the same systematic attention he would later give to Mont Sainte-Victoire reflected the Impressionist conviction that subject matter was less important than the quality of observation brought to it. The National Gallery's Cézanne holdings include several works from this transitional 1870s period that document the formation of his mature approach through the sustained discipline of working in two contrasting landscapes — the northern and the southern French.

The palette shows Pissarro's influence in its lighter, cooler tones compared to Cézanne's early dark work — blues, blue-greens, and pale ochres dominate. The brushwork is beginning to show the systematic approach to parallel strokes that would become his mature signature, though not yet fully developed.