Executed circa 1882-84, the exquisitely constructed composition of Sous-bois is dominated by a group of slender, elegant trees, their tops disappearing both beyond the edges of the sheet and into the sheet itself. Here the green, brown, purple, brown and blue tones of Paul Cézanne's pared down palette lend an increasing level of abstraction to the artist's landscape. At the same t.mes , the soft hues imbue the work with a sense of nature’s harmony: “Sensations of harmony are expressed at once in his choices of motif and in the ways in which he painted and sketched” (Matthew Simms in Exh. Cat., Princeton University Art Museum, Cézanne and the Modern, Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman collects ion, 2014, p. 131). Having rejected conventional methods of rendering perspective, Cézanne built spatial structure within the present work purely by juxtaposing different shapes and colors. By contrasting the thin horizontal and gently curved lines of the trees with the unpainted areas of paper, the artist creates a feeling of expanding and receding spaces, while this network of rhythmic shapes rendered in light, translucent hues gives the watercolor a wonderful impression of light and atmosphere, which is also seen in some of the artist’s most captivating oils of the same subject (see fig. 1).
Watercolor was a medium that remained central to Cézanne throughout his career, offering him a variety of painterly effects that differed from oil in his continuous search to solve the problem of the depiction of reality. It also allowed him to work quickly and effectively capturing a scene. The present work establishes a delicate balance between drawing and soft touches of color, which he used to modulate forms and suggest shifting structure of landscape and still life. Through his works, he scrutinized nature, seeking not to depict an exact likeness of the landscape before him, but to capture its essence, structure and sensations it produced.
He was a sensualist in art. He loved nature with a passion, perhaps to the exclusion of all else; he painted in order to prolong in himself the joy of living among the trees”
As Joseph Rishel has noted, “In the years around 1880, Cézanne developed ways of looking and painting—especially in his landscapes—that he was to spend the rest of his life refining. The key to this breakthrough was a novel approach to facture, the way pigment was applied to canvas...that liberated him from Impressionism. It allowed him to render landscape with remarkable sensuality and specificity, but, unlike the ambitious plein-air paintings of his contemporaries, it transformed the transient into something classical, structured, and serene” (Exh. Cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cézanne, 1995, pp. 193 and 217).
Few artists can claim greater influence among the generations that followed than Cézanne. His particular palette and paint handling can be seen in the work of artists from Pablo Picasso to Richard Diebenkorn, Max Ernst to Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman to David Hockney. In 1907, shortly after Cézanne’s death, a large retrospective of his work was held at the Salon d’Automne, which had an immediate effect on the young artists active in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century. Painted within two years of this exhibition, the proto-Cubist landscapes of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso take both palette and compositional cues from Cézanne’s late landscapes (see fig. 2).
