Les Grands Arbres au Jas de Bouffan

Les Grands Arbres au Jas de Bouffan (The Great Trees at Jas de Bouffan, 1886) depicts the magnificent chestnut allée that was one of the estate's most architecturally impressive features. These were eighteenth-century trees planted when the property was built as a summer house for the governors of Provence, and their size and age by the time Cézanne was painting them gave them a monumental presence that smaller or younger trees could not provide. The allée — a formal arrangement of trees creating a cathedral-like vault above the path — combined the natural and the architectural in exactly the way that interested him most. He returned to these trees repeatedly throughout the 1880s, examining them from different angles and distances, studying how the massive trunks and canopy could be rendered through his constructive stroke. The loss of the Jas de Bouffan when his father's estate was sold in 1899 marked the end of access to these trees, and the series of grand-tree paintings from the 1880s preserves what was perhaps his most intimate relationship with a specific natural subject.

The great trees demanded Cézanne's most ambitious compositional organization: the massive trunks creating vertical rhythm, the canopy overhead creating a green vault, the distant landscape glimpsed through the tree trunks providing depth. His constructive stroke builds the trunk's gnarled forms through accumulated marks that convey both the tree's specific texture and its massive weight. The palette is appropriately rich and deep — dark greens and warm browns of mature trees in summer — contrasting with the glimpsed blue of the sky beyond.