The Pond

In the early 1870s, Cézanne was living in Auvers, a small town outside Paris, and learning to work directly from nature. The Pond is painted in small, parallel strokes of blues and greens, an early version of the distinctive brushwork that plays a key role in the construction of Cézanne's mature paintings. Here, figures are placed boldly against the landscape. Cézanne would more fully integrate figure and landscape in his many later paintings of bathers.