Groupe de maisons – Les Toits

Groupe de maisons — Les Toits, at the Villa Flora in Switzerland, is one of Cézanne's roofscape paintings from around 1876 — a view of clustered houses and their tiled roofs that reduces the built environment to geometric essentials. The rooftop subject allowed Cézanne to explore the relationship between flat planes and atmospheric recession without the compositional demands of conventional landscape or figure painting, and these architectural studies were important exercises in the formal analysis that would define his mature work. The Villa Flora's collection reflects Swiss collecting of Post-Impressionist art from the early twentieth century.

The house roofs are rendered as geometric planes of warm red and ochre tile against the blue of sky and the green of surrounding vegetation, each surface analysed in terms of its orientation to the light source. Cézanne's parallel brushstrokes build the planes with a structural rigour that reveals his underlying concern with the architecture of the picture surface as much as the architecture of the houses depicted.