La Maison du père Lacroix, Auvers-sur-Oise (House of Père Lacroix)

Painted in 1873 and held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this canvas depicts a house in Auvers-sur-Oise—the village north of Paris where Cézanne worked alongside Pissarro in the early 1870s. The Maison du père Lacroix, a simple vernacular building, is treated by Cézanne with the same formal attention he brought to the most celebrated landscape subjects, its walls and roof analyzed as geometric volumes in light. The Auvers period was crucial: under Pissarro's mentorship Cézanne was learning to structure direct observation through paint, finding in Père Lacroix's house a subject that rewarded sustained pictorial analysis.

Cézanne builds the house's walls, roof, and surrounding vegetation through directional brushstrokes that begin to suggest his later constructive approach. The architectural volumes are established through carefully observed variations in the play of light across different surfaces, and the surrounding trees and garden create a complementary organic context for the geometric building.