Paysage de l'Estaque

Paysage de l'Estaque from 1908 is among the most directly Cézannian of Dufy's L'Estaque works, engaging with the landscape around the coastal town that Cézanne had transformed into a template for structural analysis of colour and plane. Dufy, Braque, and others made the pilgrimage to L'Estaque in 1908 explicitly to work through Cézanne's innovations in landscape painting, a process that would push Braque and Picasso toward Cubism while sending Dufy toward his own more decorative resolution of the same formal problems. This landscape, now in the Chapelle des pénitents blancs, shows the characteristic treatment of vegetation and horizon as interlocking geometric colour areas.

Oil on canvas. Post-Cézannian landscape handling: the picture plane is organised through the adjacency of colour patches rather than linear perspective. Foliage becomes a series of green planes, the sky a simplified blue expanse, and depth is suggested through colour temperature rather than spatial diminution.