Cézanne, Landscape with Red Roofs

Painted in L'Estaque, a village near Marseille, this landscape clearly shows the influence of Pissarro, with whom Cézanne was closely exchanging ideas at the time.

The most noticeable feature is its vertical, rather than horizontal, format. Landscapes of the era were typically painted horizontally to capture as wide a view as possible, but Pissarro preferred compositions that emphasized height and depth over breadth, and Cézanne adopted this approach. Also notable is a pine tree placed at the lower left, with a low wall beneath it — placing objects in the foreground this way lets the eye naturally read what lies behind as more distant, without the need for calculated perspective. This too was a technique Cézanne picked up from Pissarro.

To these borrowed ideas, Cézanne added a touch of his own: lightening the colors toward the background to suggest distance, echoing the way faraway objects appear hazier to the eye in real life. What looks at first like an unremarkable landscape, then, actually layers together the mutual influence shared among painters of the time and Cézanne's own quiet experimentation.