Les Peupliers

Les Peupliers (c.1879) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon depicts a motif that Monet would famously return to in his celebrated Poplars series of 1891 — the same year Cézanne was painting the Bellevue plain with equal systematic attention to a landscape motif. The contrast between their approaches to the same subject type is instructive: Monet dissolved his poplars into shimmering reflections of light, pursuing the atmospheric dissolution of solid form; Cézanne insists on the trees' vertical structural presence, their trunks as organizing verticals within a pictorial surface. By 1879 Cézanne was in a transitional phase between his Impressionist period and his mature structural method, and these poplar trees show both the inherited Impressionist freshness and the emerging systematic character of his mature brushwork. The Lyon museum's collection, one of the great French regional museums, provides a fitting institutional context for this work from the transitional years of French Post-Impressionism.

The poplar trunks are rendered as strong vertical accents of grey-brown and pale ochre, their rhythmic repetition creating a quasi-architectural screen. The foliage is applied in short, varied strokes of green and yellow, more Impressionist in touch than Cézanne's later work. The sky is handled in thin, cool blue passages. The overall composition emphasises vertical rhythm over horizontal landscape recession.