House and Trees (Maison et arbres)

House and Trees (1890) at the Barnes Foundation depicts one of the characteristic Provençal mas—simple stone farmhouses—set among trees near Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne painted rural buildings as structural subjects equivalent to his geological motifs, their geometric volumes offering excellent material for his systematic color-plane approach. By 1890 the area around Aix, which he rarely left for extended periods, had become his entire artistic world, and every corner of the landscape—farmhouse, quarry, mountain, pine grove—was potentially a canvas. The warm ochre masonry under southern light provided his characteristic palette.

The farmhouse's geometric walls are articulated through warm ochre and cream color patches. Tree forms surround the building with Cézanne's characteristic faceted foliage—each leaf zone treated as a color plane rather than rendered individually. The spatial relationship between house and trees is organized through overlapping color zones rather than linear perspective.