Paysage à Cassis

A hillside landscape reduced to interlocking planes of dark green, black-green, and ochre-gold. A large, near-black tree mass dominates the center, flanked by rounded green foliage forms with dark outlines. A strip of blue sky and a distant green hill are visible at the upper left. The paint is applied in broad, flat areas with minimal detail. Derain painted at Cassis, a small port town east of Marseille, during his period of Cézanne-influenced work after 1907. The simplified, geometric treatment of the landscape and the dark, heavy palette mark this as post-Fauvist — the wild color of 1905 replaced by something more structured and somber.