PHILIPPE BISMUTH EXPERTISE

Certificate no. 24.05.30/21594 confirming inclusion in the forthcoming digital catalogue raisonné of Maurice de Vlaminck, issued by the Wildenstein-Plattner Institute.

Dated by specialists to around 1916, this painting still belongs to what is commonly referred to as Vlaminck’s Cézannian period. The artist had by then developed a pictorial language that still retained echoes of Fauvism, yet was already moving away from it through a newly acquired sense of gravity and restraint.

Following the Cézanne retrospective held at the Salon d’Automne in 1907, a revelation for the entire young avant-garde, Vlaminck became increasingly concerned with the construction of landscape, the tension of forms, and the density of paint. He would later confess to having felt a kind of posthumous jealousy towards

Cézanne: the envy of a painter discovering that another, before him, had already succeeded in endowing landscape with such profound inner strength.

Without ever lapsing into imitation, Vlaminck gradually purified his compositions, reinforced their underlying structure, and narrowed his palette to muted, subdued tones, moving away from the purely colouristic brilliance of his early years. Unlike Derain or Braque, who explored Cubism, Vlaminck remained faithful to representation and to nature itself. Yet, like

Cézanne, he sought to convey the permanence of things, their weight and their presence. His painting became more austere and more rigorously constructed, transforming the landscapes of the Île-de-France into inward, charged, and almost dramatic motifs.

Leaving behind Chatou, Le Pecq and Bougival, the favoured settings of his Fauvist years, he turned instead to the villages of the Vexin region, such as Nesles-la-Vallée, Auvers-sur-Oise and La Roche-Guyon, where he found landscapes commensurate with his evolving vision.

Leaden skies, austere walls and roads lined with dark trees became the framework for a painting structured by broad diagonals and compact masses.

The present work harmoniously embodies all the defining characteristics of this period.

Vlaminck organises space with remarkable rigour, a composition structured around a diagonal road, the dark masses of trees, discreet human figures set back in the landscape, and a dramatic sky rendered with broad impasto brushwork. Cézanne’s influence can be felt in the architectural organisation of the landscape, while Vlaminck’s own temperament—dramatic, introspective and solitary—imbues the painting with a singular emotional density.

Far removed from anecdote or narrative, Vlaminck here asserts a restrained form of modernity, deeply rooted in the earth and sustained by a profoundly human vision of the world.

This Cézannian phase, which lasted for nearly a decade, came to an end around 1917–1918, when the war and its ensuing disillusionments led the artist towards a freer, more expressionistic, and even darker manner of painting. As such, it represents a pivotal stage between the Fauvist Vlaminck and the more sombre, expressionist artist of the 1920s.