Landscape Near Aix-en-Provence

Paul Cezanne

National Gallery of Art

At least four buildings are lightly sketched in black graphite across two long pages of an open notebook. The largest of the four buildings is to the right, and it nearly spans the height of the page. It has three levels and a chimney. Three buildings stretching to the left may be conjoined to each other and possibly to the first structure. These have one or two stories and are sketched with less detail. Trees and shrubs peek over and around these structures. The leftmost quarter of the spread is harder to make out. A horizontal line near the top edge of that sheet could be a high horizon with trees and perhaps a church steeple silhouetted against the sky. Under that, some horizontal and vertical lines at first suggest another structure of some kind, but details as well as some darker shapes there are difficult to interpret. The paper is yellowed with age.