Georges Braque: L'Estaque Landscape (1908) Analysis

Context and Subject Matter

In this painting, we find a rural landscape where houses and vegetation are the most distinctive features. This work belongs to a series of landscapes painted by Braque in L'Estaque, on the Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Les Martigues.

Artistic Elements and Techniques

• Braque uses a broad and distinct brushwork that creates levels of color next to the line, resulting in a fairly smooth texture, although some areas show a more grassy brushwork.
• The color palette is restrained, dominated by cool colors such as gray, blue, and green. However, there are some warm colors like browns and oranges, strategically placed in specific areas. The colors refer to the nature of objects but are not intended to reproduce them accurately; what stands out is the contrast between color planes with distinct boundaries.
• The line defines the forms and volumes of the landscape elements, forming the basic structure of the painting.
• The objects are illuminated, with some of their faces shaded, but not in response to natural light but rather a formal study, so that each represented object radiates its own light. The shadows and color changes help to suggest volume. Traditional chiaroscuro is absent.

Compositional Structure

• The painting is composed of polyhedral shapes made of squares, rectangles, and trapezoids, resulting in volumes similar to quartz crystals. These are juxtaposed and treated with autonomy in terms of light and color, contributing to a feeling of alienation and the individuality of each prism.
• Two warmer color zones are strategically arranged: one in the lower-left foreground, and the other in the center of the top. These areas give the picture a certain clarity and depth. However, one of the most interesting aspects is the feeling of space because it breaks with the pictorial tradition regarding Brunelleschi's perspective. Cubism marked a break with the established conception of the Renaissance picture, which resembled a window through which the viewer looked.
• The space is constructed from forms and exists only in terms of them; almost all elements of the landscape turn towards the foreground, towards the surface of the painting.

Stylistic Characteristics

This work, created in the summer of 1908—a year before Picasso painted Factory at Horta de Ebro—puts into practice Cézanne's ideas of defining objects based on geometric shapes.

Geometric forms and the existence of multiple points of view lead us to classify this as a work of early Cubism. Moreover, it is a landscape, which is unusual for a movement that typically focused on still life.