Paysage près de Melun (Landscape near Melun)

Paysage près de Melun (c.1879) at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo documents Cézanne's working period in the Melun area of the Seine-et-Marne — the flat, agricultural landscape of the Paris basin rather than his native Provence. By 1879 he was increasingly identified as an independent Post-Impressionist rather than a member of the Impressionist group, having stopped exhibiting with the group in 1877. The Melun landscape provides a very different formal challenge from the dramatic geological subjects of Provence: flat agricultural land, gentle river curves, the characteristic grey-green palette of the Île-de-France. The Oslo collection's Norwegian context connects this northern French landscape to Scandinavian modernism's engagement with French painting — Norwegian artists like Harriet Backer and Christian Krogh were working in Paris in the same period, and institutions like the Oslo national museum were building their French collections from precisely this moment.

The landscape is painted in a cooler palette than Cézanne's Provençal work — greens, blues, and gray-greens dominate. His brushwork is varied and somewhat exploratory, responsive to different surfaces. The spatial organization already shows his tendency to build depth through overlapping color planes rather than atmospheric perspective.