Lac d'Annecy

This one is for Lizanne, huge Cezanne's fan. Happy Birthday! :) The Lac d'Annecy was painted in July 1896 at Talloires on the shores of this lake in Haute-Savoie, in the foothills of the French Alps, looking towards the Château de Duingt, half hidden by trees on the far side of the lake. Cézanne wrote in a letter to Gasquet from Talloires: "This is a temperate zone. The surrounding hills are quite lofty. The lake, which at this point narrows to a bottleneck, seems to lend itself to the line drawing exercises of young ladies. Certainly it is still a bit of nature, but a little like we've been taught to see it in the albums of young lady travellers." In this canvas, with its vibrant colour and monumental structure, Cézanne was clearly determined to transcend this commonplace picturesque. The painting is dominated by a cool colour range of blues and greens, sometimes deep and sonorous in tone, but its principal focuses are provided by the succession of warm accents which runs across it: the areas where the early morning sunshine strikes the tree-trunk on the left, the distant hills and the buildings on the opposite shore.