Description
Lake Annecy – Cézanne’s only Alpine subject
Lake Annecy was made in the summer of 1896, when Cézanne spent a few weeks in Savoy – far from his Provence. Past a dark tree in the foreground the view opens onto the blue-green lake, a château on the far shore and steep slopes above. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this cool, Alpine subject into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A painter the landscape did not suit
Cézanne did not write about Annecy with enthusiasm – in a letter he described it as a place too much like a postcard and too little like the nature he knew. One of his most ordered canvases came of it all the same. Dissatisfaction with the scene evidently forced him to lean even harder on construction.
A tree as a frame
The trunk and branches in the left foreground work as a frame through which we look. This device – a dark, sharp shape in front that opens a bright distance – is frequent in Cézanne; without it the lake would become a mere plane.
What you see on the canvas
A dark tree on the left, the blue-green surface of the water with its reflections in the middle, and on the far shore a building with a tower, behind it steep slopes sunk in blue. The original is painted in oil on canvas, was made in 1896 and is held by the Courtauld Gallery in London.
The summer of 1896 and a letter from Savoy
Lake Annecy came out of a short stay in Savoy in the summer of 1896 – one of the few working periods Cézanne spent outside Provence. The place itself did not convince him: in a letter he called it too tidy, an almost picture-postcard nature that did not suit him. The canvas later ended up in the collection of the British industrialist Samuel Courtauld, and since his gift of 1932 it has been publicly accessible in London. That one of his most ordered canvases came out of a subject he did not care for is among the finer contradictions of his work.
Alpine calm on canvas
The reflections on the lake are built from planes that a hand-laid stroke keeps and print blurs. Available in ten sizes or to your own measurements. The cool blue-green scale is calming in a bedroom or an office. Choose the frame with the help of our 3D preview. Among our reproductions of famous paintings you will find Cézanne’s other water and mountain subjects: The Bridge over the Marne at Créteil, L’Estaque and Jas de Bouffan, The Pond.
- Subject: Lake Annecy, Paul Cézanne, 1896, Courtauld Gallery, London
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: a rare Alpine subject for Cézanne – the place was not to his taste, yet the canvas counts among his most ordered
