The house with the red roof

The House with the Red Roof (1887) depicts a Provençal farmhouse whose warm terracotta roofing tiles provided the composition's dominant chromatic note. This chromatic relationship — warm roof against cool stone wall and blue sky — was one of Cézanne's most studied formal situations in the Provençal landscape, and he returned to it across many canvases during the 1880s. The specific red-orange of traditional Mediterranean roofing tile was a constant in the landscape around Aix, and its relationship to the blue Provençal sky was among the strongest complementary color contrasts available to him in the outdoor world. By 1887 his approach to such subjects was fully systematic: the warm and cool color areas organized into interlocking planes that built the landscape's spatial relationships without conventional linear perspective or atmospheric dissolution. The German location of this work reflects the early enthusiasm for Cézanne among German collectors and museum directors that preceded the broader international recognition of his importance.

The red roof dominates the palette in warm terracotta-orange, set against the blue-grey of sky and the cooler ochre-grey of stone walls. Cézanne builds the roof through organized parallel strokes that convey both the tiles' flat plane and the slight texture of overlapping ceramics. The wall below is rendered in the cooler ochre of Provençal stone. His systematic analysis creates the strong chromatic relationship between warm and cool that was one of his central formal investigations.