The House with the Cracked Walls

Paul Cézanne

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

"The House with the Cracked Walls" (La Maison lézardée) depicts an abandoned, dilapidated structure whose prominent crack runs the full length of the building, set amid rocky terrain and framed by tall, slender trees. Executed in oil on canvas between 1892 and 1894, the work exemplifies Cézanne's mature Post-Impressionist approach: structured, deliberate brushwork, an earthy and muted palette, and a formal treatment of architecture and landscape that simultaneously conveys depth and pictorial flatness. During the 1890s, Cézanne increasingly sought out the secluded, rocky landscapes east of Aix-en-Provence, where decaying and abandoned architecture merged with wild nature to produce compositions of quiet melancholy and structural intensity. Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, Cézanne became one of the most transformative figures in Western art, whose analytical method of building form through color directly laid the groundwork for Cubism and much of twentieth-century modernism.