The house with the red roof

Paul Cézanne's The House with the Red Roof (1887) depicts a Provençal farmhouse whose distinctive terracotta roof tiles provide the composition's dominant chromatic note. The red-roofed house was among Cézanne's most characteristic architectural subjects — the warm terracotta of traditional Mediterranean roofing contrasting strongly with the blue Provençal sky and the cooler grey of stone walls. This chromatic relationship — warm roof against cool stone and sky — organized many of his architectural landscapes and was one of his most studied compositional situations.

The red roof dominates the palette in warm terracotta-orange, set against the blue-grey of sky and the cooler ochre-grey of stone walls. Cézanne builds the roof through organized parallel strokes that convey both the tiles' flat plane and the slight texture of overlapping ceramics. The wall below is rendered in the cooler ochre of Provençal stone. His systematic analysis creates the strong chromatic relationship between warm and cool that was one of his central formal investigations.