La Route tournante (Turn in the Road)

This 1880 canvas of a winding road through the Fontainebleau forest, held at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, is one of several Cézanne painted during his visits to the area south of Paris. The 'turn in the road' motif — a path curving out of sight — was a classic compositional device that Cézanne transforms through his analytical approach. Rather than using the road as a perspectival device drawing the eye into pictorial depth, he flattens its recession, making the turning road a pattern element within an overall color arrangement. The work anticipates the spatial innovations of his mature landscapes.

The curving road creates an S-shaped movement through the composition that organizes the surrounding foliage and ground. Cézanne's color is relatively naturalistic here — greens, ochres, and brown earth tones — but his brushwork already shows the directional, constructive quality of his emerging mature method.