Paysage près de Melun (Landscape near Melun)

This 1879 canvas of a landscape near Melun, held in Oslo, was painted during one of Cézanne's rare sustained periods working north of Paris. Melun, on the Seine south of Paris, offered a landscape very different from Provence — flat, green, and cool — and the Oslo canvas shows him applying his emerging structural method to northern topography. The painting belongs to a transitional moment in his development: he has moved past pure Impressionism but has not yet fully arrived at the systematic parallel-stroke method of his mature Provençal work. The result is a canvas that sits between two modes — atmospheric and structural simultaneously.

The landscape is painted in a cooler palette than Cézanne's Provençal work — greens, blues, and gray-greens dominate. His brushwork is varied and somewhat exploratory, responsive to different surfaces. The spatial organization already shows his tendency to build depth through overlapping color planes rather than atmospheric perspective.