Study of Houses 1879 - 1882

This is a pencil study of houses by Paul Cézanne. A humble material, graphite offers the artist a direct means of translating what he sees onto paper, in a style that can be raw and immediate. The marks are direct and functional, quickly establishing the spatial and structural relationships between forms. Cézanne is less interested in the fine details of his subject, than in the underlying structure of a building and its relationship to the surrounding landscape. It is a type of visual analysis. The apparent lack of refinement is exactly the point. Cézanne valued the evidence of the artist’s hand. Although this may appear to be a quick sketch, it contains the seeds of his revolutionary approach to painting, where form is built up through the accumulation of simple marks, each carefully considered in relation to the whole. This echoes the work of stonemasons who literally built such houses. It can be helpful to view even a simple drawing as a record of creative labor.