Woods with Millstone 1894

Paul Cézanne painted Woods with Millstone, sometime around 1898, with oil on canvas. Cézanne, living in a rapidly industrializing France, turned to the landscape for solace, grounding himself in the tangible and the enduring. This painting, though seemingly a simple landscape, reveals a complex interplay between nature and the remnants of human activity. The old millstone, lying dormant amidst the trees, speaks to a bygone era of manual labor. We might consider how the painting captures a moment of transition, reflecting on labor and class, and raising questions about progress and its impact on both the land and its people. Cézanne once said that he wanted to "surprise an apple." Perhaps here, he is inviting us to surprise the landscape, to see it not just as a pretty scene, but as a repository of memory, labor, and history. What he offers us is a way of seeing that acknowledges the complex relationships between humanity and the natural world.