The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue (1890): Art, History and Details

The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue (1890) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Paul Cezanne (French, 1839–1906).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Paul Cezanne painted this composition in three horizontal planes: the azure blue of the sky; the luminous white of the tower and the farmyard buildings; and the burnt-orange shade of the foreground earth, whose color is indicative of the iron-rich soil of Provence. The shimmering greens of Cezanne’s favorite cypress and olive trees are interspersed across the middle ground. The composition is pared down to its essentials, devoid of extraneous detail; it exemplifies his ambition “to make something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.”

Object facts

• Title: The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue
• Date: 1890
• Creator attribution: Paul Cezanne (French, 1839–1906)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 95.5 x 113 x 7 cm (37 5/8 x 44 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 65.6 x 81.5 cm (25 13/16 x 32 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1936.19

A detail from the museum

Cézanne’s method of compressing space and simplifying forms into flattened, geometric shapes provided the foundation for both Fauvism and Cubism.

Collection credit

The James W. Corrigan Memorial

Further reading listed by the museum

• Rivière, Georges. Le Maître Paul Cézanne. Paris: H. Floury, 1923.
• Milliken, William. "Fifty Years of French Art." The Arts 10 (December 1926): 336-338.
• Watson, Forbes. "New York Exhibitions." The Arts 13 (February 1928): 106-115.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.