Work

Houses at l’Estaque (see below), an oil painting by Georges Braque in 1908, is considered as the first Cubist landscape. The painting was a response to works by Paul Cézanne, who was Braque’s idol and lived in L’Estaque for a period of time. This work itself was also influenced by Cézanne’s style, as Braque painted the houses and trees from multiple perspectives instead of a unifying one, and therefore we cannot find a vanishing point in this painting like we often do. Braque also simplified both the forms and the use of colors. He reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image (1); he also adopted a monochromatic palette of mainly ochre, brown, dark green and grey in this painting to create a non-naturalistic tone. His Cubism style gave each object in this scene a comprehensive description, no matter whether this object was in the front or in the back.