The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue
Paul Cezanne (French, 1839–1906)
1890
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 95.5 x 113 x 7 cm (37 5/8 x 44 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 65.6 x 81.5 cm (25 13/16 x 32 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- The James W. Corrigan Memorial
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Paul Cezanne painted this composition in three horizontal planes: the azure blue of the sky; the luminous white of the tower and the farmyard buildings; and the burnt-orange shade of the foreground earth, whose color is indicative of the iron-rich soil of Provence. The shimmering greens of Cezanne’s favorite cypress and olive trees are interspersed across the middle ground. The composition is pared down to its essentials, devoid of extraneous detail; it exemplifies his ambition “to make something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.”
