The Great Pine

Standing tall and proud in the middle of this scene is a single pine tree, its branches reaching out in every direction against a moody blue sky. Paul Cézanne painted this in the south of France, near his beloved hometown of Aix-en-Provence, sometime in the 1890s. The pine was a tree he knew well and returned to again and again in his work. Some say it reminded him of his childhood, when he and his close friend, the writer Émile Zola, would wander the countryside together.

What makes Cézanne special is the way he built his paintings out of small, deliberate brushstrokes, almost like patches of color stitched together. Instead of trying to copy nature exactly, he wanted to capture its underlying structure and feeling. You can see it here in the way the leaves shimmer with greens and yellows, and how the warm orange earth in the foreground plays against the cool blues above. This approach would later inspire a whole generation of artists, including Picasso, who once called Cézanne "the father of us all."