View of Auvers-sur-Oise is the common English name for a Paul Cézanne painting known by various French names, usually Paysage d'Auvers-sur-Oise, or in the artist's catalogue raisonné, Groupe de maisons, paysage d'île de France. It is believed to have been painted in 1879–80, several years after Cézanne's residence in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village northwest of Paris. The painting depicts a landscape of Northern France; the exact location has not been determined.
Victor Chocquet bought the painting from the artist, and it remained in his family's collection until the early 20th century. Later it came into the possession of Bruno Cassirer, who loaned it to the Kunsthaus Zürich. It was inherited by Cassirer's daughter Sophie, and after her death in 1979 it was accepted in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.
Shortly after midnight on New Year's Day 2000, guards at the Ashmolean, responding to a fire alarm, discovered the painting was missing. Police believe the thief or thieves used a smoke bomb and that night's millennium celebrations as a cover for the theft of the museum's only Cézanne and the only painting taken. It has not been recovered.
Description
The oil-on-canvas painting depicts a rolling landscape below a blue sky filled with clouds, represented as smears of paint. Down a green slope from the viewer are a group of houses, white with roofs either blue or orange, again not depicted in detail. Scattered among them are trees, most green, but some with more yellowish color apparent. In the background another hillside with houses amid trees rises; a church spire rises at the crest.
The location of the landscape depicted in the painting is unknown. The painting is high by wide. Cézanne's signature is in red paint at the lower left.
History
Camille Pissarro, whom Cézanne came to see as both friend and mentor, moved to Pontoise, a small country town northwest of Paris, in 1872 after his previous country residence in Louveciennes, west of Paris, was stripped of all its contents while he was in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War two years earlier. The following year, Cézanne moved to neighboring Auvers-sur-Oise, where he and Pissarro lived within walking distance of each other, and often painted side by side in plein air. They painted the same subjects, but in different and distinctive works.
The two were trying to capture the "perception of sensation" in their work. Cézanne's style, especially in his landscapes, reflected the influence of his fellow artist, even as the two preferred different techniques—Pissarro dabbing while Cézanne daubed or smeared, according to a local resident who watched them both paint. Cézanne began using brighter colors than he had previously, with less stark contrasts.
A catalogue to a 2006 joint exhibition of their work from this period at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris calls the two Impressionism's "painters of the earth", counterparts to its two "painters of water", Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. But "with Cézanne the spectator is openly invited to observe the way he portrays surfaces" the catalog observes. "Shapes are simplified and each brushstroke is amplified. His paintings are intense reflections of his method."
View of Auvers-sur-Oise was painted later, in 1879–80. By this time, Cézanne was preparing to leave Paris and return to his native Aix-en-Provence, where he continued painting in this style, including similar landscapes, moving toward Post-Impressionism. Ashmolean Museum director Christopher Brown describes the painting as important to understanding the artist's career, showing him transitioning from his early work to the mature style he brought to well-known later works.
Provenance
French bureaucrat Victor Chocquet, a collector and advocate for Impressionism, bought the painting. After his death in 1891, it was bequeathed to his wife Marie. In 1899 the Chocquet collection was exhibited at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, under the title Auvers. In turn it was purchased by another collector of Impressionist works, Thadée Natanson.
Natanson auctioned his collection, including View of Auvers-sur-oise, at the Hôtel Drouot in 1908. It passed that way to another prominent collector, German publisher Bruno Cassirer. He loaned it to his cousin Paul for a 1921 Berlin exhibit of Cézanne works in private German collections; it was titled Ansicht an Aix. Bruno made the painting part of an extended loan to the Kunsthaus Zürich, which exhibited it in 1933 as Regenlandschaft. On another loan to a Swiss museum, the Kunsthalle Basel. This time it was known as Bei Auvers.