ABSTRACT
Paul Cezanne’s never-ending humble and heroic search for truth is the moral condition of his art and a primary source of its greatness. The fact that Cezanne could represent exactly the form of objects is of no importance in itself; but it is significant that he wanted to, and did, maintain the identity of individual objects at the same time as he adjusted and bent them to his creative will. In this particular painting he has made the fork of the garden wall echo the slant of the fields which fan out from the house, and he has brought into rhythmic accord the arcs and angles of the branches of the tree, the mountain and the valley. Besides the oil paintings, there are at least three very exact pencil and watercolour drawings of the specific pine tree in the Oberlin sheet.
