The Brook

The Brook (c.1895) at the Cleveland Museum of Art depicts a Provençal watercourse — the small, rocky streams and rivulets that cut through the hillsides around Aix-en-Provence. Water moving through a rocky landscape provided Cézanne with a subject of exceptional formal interest: the turbulent, irregular surface of moving water over stones, the reflections of sky and overhanging vegetation, the contrast between the fluid medium and the solid geological forms of the stream bed. By 1895 his method was fully mature — the Vollard retrospective had just confirmed his reputation — and this brook subject shows his late confident application of the constructive stroke to a challenging naturalistic subject. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds significant Post-Impressionist works including the late Sainte-Victoire, and this brook landscape documents the full range of his mature landscape subjects from geological to botanical to hydrological.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.