Description
Poplars – the canvas Cézanne lets breathe
Poplars is one of those Cézanne landscapes in which the paint deliberately does not cover everything. Slender trunks rise in a row into dense, restless foliage, a meadow with a narrow path stretches below, and a low stone wall shows white among the trees on the right. The canvas measures about 65 × 80 cm, was painted in 1879-1880, and is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (inv. RF 2324). With us it is made as a hand-painted painting on canvas, worked in oil.
The white ground showing through the strokes
Step close and you notice something unusual: the white ground of the canvas shows through almost everywhere between the strokes. In these years Cézanne worked with slanting, parallel touches and did not blend them into a smooth surface – between them he left the bare priming to breathe. It is exactly those pale gaps that give the scene light and restlessness, so the green never settles into a heavy mass but shimmers. A flat reproduction cannot carry this across, because it merges the strokes into an even surface and the white ground disappears.
How to paint a wall of green
A landscape ruled by leaves is a thankless task: everything is green and everything looks equally far away. Cézanne solved it by setting the uprightness of the poplars against the confused mass of the other trees. The straight verticals act as a scaffold along which the eye finds order, and everything else is then free to dissolve into movement. This is why it is not an idyllic backdrop in the manner of the Barbizon school, but a constructed scene.
Beside the Viosne near Pontoise
The motif was painted beside the river Viosne near Pontoise; the museum connects it with the grounds of the château de Marcouville, though the sources do not fully agree on the exact spot. Camille Pissarro, the older companion who opened up painting in the open air for Cézanne, had worked in the same area a few years earlier. The canvas passed through several private hands and in 1921 entered the French national collections as the bequest of Joseph Reinach.
At home Poplars works best where there is enough distance for the green to breathe – above a long sofa, along a staircase, or in a study. Green and ochre are quiet colours, so the scene does not tire the eye even in a room you spend hours in. It comes in fifteen sizes, from 50 × 40 cm to 180 × 145 cm; if none of them is right, we stretch the canvas to a custom size. How the scene looks framed you can check in our 3D preview application. If among our art paintings on canvas further Cézanne landscapes interest you, look at Village Road, Auvers, The House of Père Lacroix in Auvers and The Great Pine.
- Subject: Poplars, Paul Cézanne, 1879-1880, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 2324)
- Technique: hand-painted work, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: between the slanting strokes the painter deliberately left the white ground bare
