Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan

A row of leafless chestnut trees rises like tall dark pillars across this wintry landscape by Paul Cézanne, a painter who helped push art toward the modern age. These trees grew at the Jas de Bouffan, the family estate near Aix-en-Provence in southern France where Cézanne spent countless hours. He returned to this place over and over with his brushes, and it is easy to see why. Peeking through the maze of branches are the sandy walls of farm buildings and, far off, the soft blue silhouette of a mountain.

The way Cézanne put the scene together is worth pausing on. Rather than blending everything smoothly, he laid down small blocks of color side by side, letting each patch hold its own place. That method became his trademark and gave younger artists, especially the Cubists, plenty to think about. Structure mattered more to him than fine detail, so he focused on how the trees, walls, and hills balanced against one another. The speckled green grass and the muted gray sky lend the whole thing a hushed, faintly gloomy air, the kind of feeling that settles in on a bare, quiet winter day.