{"id":183614,"date":"2026-08-09T17:43:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T15:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/?post_type=product&p=183614"},"modified":"2026-08-09T17:43:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T15:43:40","slug":"turn-in-the-road","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/en\/paul-cezanne\/turn-in-the-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul C\u00e9zanne \u2013 Turn in the Road at Auvers-sur-Oise"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Turn in the Road at Auvers-sur-Oise \u2013 the canvas exhibited for decades under the wrong region\u2019s name<\/h2>\n

A pale ochre road comes in from the lower left, turns to the right and disappears behind a low stone wall. Beyond the wall farmhouses rise with grey and brownish roofs, and around them stand trees in green, olive and brown. There is only a little sky above the roofs. This hand-painted painting on canvas<\/strong> reproduces C\u00e9zanne\u2019s work of about 1881, which measures 60 \u00d7 73 centimetres in the original and is held by the Museum of Fine Arts<\/strong> in Boston under the inventory number 48.525.<\/p>\n

Four American exhibitions, one wrong title<\/h3>\n

In January 1928 the canvas was in New York at Wildenstein\u2019s in the exhibition Paul C\u00e9zanne<\/em> as number 14, lent by the Boston collector John T. Spaulding. In March and April 1929 it was at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, near Boston, as number 5 with plate XXIII, and from June to November 1934 at the Art Institute of Chicago in A Century of Progress<\/em> as number 292. Between these it was shown twice at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well, in 1929 and in 1931\u20131932. Every time Spaulding lent it \u2013 and every time the same wrong place-name stood in the catalogue.<\/p>\n

Aix or Auvers<\/h3>\n

The titles under which the canvas travelled America read Environs d\u2019Aix<\/em>, Environs d\u2019Aix-en-Provence<\/em> and Environs of Aix<\/em> \u2013 the country around Aix. But the place painted is not Aix. The catalogue raisonn\u00e9 names among the locales Auvers-sur-Oise<\/em> and Valhermeil<\/em>, both in northern France<\/strong>, north-west of Paris; Aix lies in Provence, some seven hundred kilometres further south. The title had therefore missed not the village but the end of the country. Only the full title the catalogue uses today \u2013 La Route tournante (rue des Roches au Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise)<\/em> \u2013 names even the street.<\/p>\n

Nine owners, two with a question mark<\/h3>\n

The provenance opens with a name in brackets and a question mark: (Julien-Fran\u00e7ois Tanguy, Paris?)<\/em>. With certainty the canvas belonged to the critic and collector Th\u00e9odore Duret<\/strong> in Paris; at the sale of his collection at the Galerie G. Petit on 19 March 1894 the work was number 3. There follow the painter Paul-C\u00e9sar Helleu, again with a question mark Ambroise Vollard, then Claude Monet<\/strong>, who acquired it on 10 May 1907, and after him his son Michel Monet at Giverny. Later it was with Paul Rosenberg, the Wildenstein galleries in New York, and from 1927 John T. Spaulding in Boston, whose bequest brought it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1948.<\/p>\n

The auction of 1894<\/h3>\n

The sale of the Duret collection on 19 March 1894 is the one exactly dated transfer in the whole provenance to carry a lot number: the canvas was third in the sale. Duret was a writer and an advocate of the Impressionists, and his sale was one of those events after which works from the circle of sympathetic writers scattered among collectors. The buyer the record does not name; the next name in the chain is Helleu\u2019s.<\/p>\n

A road you cannot walk down<\/h3>\n

The construction is simple and unusual at once. The road turns and vanishes behind the wall \u2013 the viewer cannot see where it leads and cannot follow it with the eye. The wall is painted as a single light band, and the houses behind it as blocks set one beside another with no perspective diminution. The trees are painted not as individual crowns but as dense masses closing the space above the houses. That is why the work feels closed: it holds no view, only a stretch of village road and what stands around it.<\/p>\n

The turn as a catalogue heading<\/h3>\n

Among the motifs the catalogue gives this canvas not only houses, road and wall but, separately, the route tournante<\/em>, the turning road, as a heading of its own. That is not accidental: the same motif stands in the title of several works by C\u00e9zanne, and the catalogue treats it as a recurring theme. Among them is a canvas of the same measurements, 60 \u00d7 73 centimetres, also in Boston but in a different collection \u2013 which is why with this motif the ratio of the sides says nothing, and only the museum\u2019s inventory number tells them apart.<\/p>\n

The quiet green and ochre range suits this canvas to a living room or a dining room, where the work is not meant to shout. It is available in fifteen sizes, from 50 \u00d7 41 to 180 \u00d7 149 centimetres, all measurements in centimetres; intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher frame, and the effect on the wall is shown in advance by our 3D application<\/strong>. From the same village comes The House of the Hanged Man at Auvers-sur-Oise<\/a>, and from the south The Village of Gardanne<\/a> and The Red Rock<\/a>.<\/p>\n