Melun vu depuis Le Mée-sur-Seine

Melun vu depuis Le Mée-sur-Seine depicts the town of Melun seen from across the Seine from Le Mée-sur-Seine, in the Seine-et-Marne department southeast of Paris. Cézanne spent time in Melun in 1879–1880, working in a region that offered the gently structured landscapes of the Paris basin rather than the dramatic, sun-burnt terrain of Provence. The view across the river to the town, with its cathedral and bridge reflected in the water, is treated as a problem in the organization of horizontal bands — river, buildings, sky — that anticipates his mature compositional approach.

The composition organizes into horizontal strata — the river surface in the foreground, the low buildings of Melun in the middle ground, the sky above — a structure Cézanne imposes on the view to find pictorial order in the flat, undramatic terrain. The cathedral's vertical profile provides the sole significant accent against the horizontal sequence.