L'Estaque, Melting Snow [SEP] material used
L'Estaque, Melting Snow
L'Estaque, Melting Snow is a c. 1871 oil-on-canvas painting by French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne. It shows a view from the outskirts of L'Estaque, a small village near Marseille, with a steep hillside covered in a drift of melting snow underneath a foreboding dark grey sky. Filled with intense emotion, the painting has been described as similar to the work of Vincent van Gogh the following decade, and a painting more formally similar to early 20th-century than contemporaneous art.
. The whites, greys and blacks are used mostly for emotional impact. Though "L'Estaque, Melting Snow" evidences Cézanne's new-found facility in depicting the deep space of a landscape, it is marked by an emotional intensity closer in spirit to the turbulence of his early figure works than to the structural complexity of the later landscape paintings.
The diagonal of the hill cuts across the painting from left to right, dividing avalanche on one side and gloom on the other. The hill sweeps down until it rests just