Description
Woods with Millstone – a stone in the middle of the forest
In the park of the Château Noir estate an abandoned millstone lies among the trees, with a few worked blocks of stone beside it. Cézanne painted them exactly as they were: without a story, as geometric shapes the forest had slowly grown over. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this unusual subject into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A circle among nothing but diagonals
Almost everything on this canvas is slanted – trunks, branches, planes of shadow. The one clear, regular shape is the round millstone in the lower left corner. Cézanne did not set it at the centre but at the edge, where it works as a counterweight to the whole restless mesh.
A forest without idyll
This is not a friendly wood. There is no path, no figure, no vista – the scene is closed, dense and a little sombre. In subjects like this Cézanne was not interested in atmosphere but in the question of how to paint a space in which there is nothing to measure distance by.
What you see on the canvas
Among thin, slanting trunks, rocks and worked blocks of stone pile up in the foreground, and a large round millstone lies among them. Above, the foliage closes into a dark roof. The original is painted in oil on canvas and by the collection’s record measures about 91.7 × 73.4 cm; it was made at the end of the 19th century.
A dense wood for a study
This subject is made of nothing but diagonals and one single round shape; we paint it by hand so that the proportions stay alive, and never as a print. Ten sizes or a size to your measurements. The dark green-brown scale suits a library or a study. Try the frame with a realistic 3D preview. Among our reproductions of famous paintings you will find Cézanne’s other woodland and rock subjects: Rocks and Branches at Bibémus, Pines and Rocks (Fontainebleau?) and Bend in Forest Road.
- Subject: Woods with Millstone, Paul Cézanne, 1898–1900
- 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: the only regular shape on a restless canvas is the round millstone at the lower edge
