The François Zola Dam

The François Zola Dam, now at Museum Wales in Cardiff, depicts the dam built on the Arc river above Aix-en-Provence that supplied the city's water. Named after François Zola, father of the novelist Émile Zola — Cézanne's childhood friend — the dam was a prominent modern engineering work in the landscape Cézanne painted obsessively. The subject is unusual in his oeuvre, which rarely engages with industrial or engineering subjects, but the dam's geometric form and its integration into rocky Provençal landscape made it an interesting formal problem. Zola père had been the principal engineer responsible for the dam's construction.

The geometric forms of the dam's masonry — its curved face, its straight top edge — provide an unusual degree of architectural structure in Cézanne's landscape. He uses this geometry as an anchor for the more loosely organized natural elements — rock, water, vegetation — that surround it, creating a tension between the human-made and the natural.