The compositional technique of repoussoir had originated in the conventions of figurative painting during the Renaissance. In the early nineteenth century, windows, balconies and other structures were used to frame distant landscapes, recalling the windows used in many Renaissance and earlier paintings to afford far landscape views.

Carl Gustav Carus was one of the pioneers of these framed views. When he visited Naples in about 1829-30, he stayed close to Castel dell’Ovo, and framed a view from sea level in his Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples (via Santa Lucia and the Castel dell’Ovo).

Painting nearly a century later, Pierre Bonnard was no stranger to the conventional use of trees for repoussoir, as shown in his spectacular view of Earthly Paradise from 1916-20. In some of his paintings, he moved the trees into the centre instead.

Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room from 1930-31 uses thin slivers of figures at its edges for its first plane of repoussoir, beyond which are one of the artist’s favourite repoussoir structures, French windows.

Another trend was for the trees forming the repoussoir frame to break out and march across the landscape. One of its first exponents was Camille Corot.

In about 1830, Corot painted Honfleur: Calvary just outside that town, on the southern bank of the Seine where it reaches the sea, south of Le Havre. These trees won’t behave in normal repoussoir, but have started to march across the middle of his view.

In his early landscapes, Camille Pissarro had used trees to frame his motifs in repoussoir, but during the late 1860s they started to invade more central areas of his canvas. In about 1869, in his Winter Landscape at Louveciennes, tree trunks and branches came to divide the landscape beyond into small strips, hiding that motif.

Around 1877, when Pissarro was probably in company with Paul Cézanne at Pontoise, the pair of them painted the same motif hidden or revealed by the same trees. Pissarro’s Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise shows how this revolt started to spread.

At the end of the nineteenth century, during Piet Mondrian’s realist period, he incorporated more radical techniques in his landscapes. This view of St. Jacob’s Church, Winterswijk from about 1898 is broken into tiny fragments by the invasive branches.

Claude Monet’s Poplars on the Bank of the Epte (1892) also avoids the cliché of traditional repoussoir to allow it to develop flowing rhythms.

My last artist leaves us puzzles: Paul Cézanne, who apparently wanted to control the viewer’s perception of the geometry of the painting, in particular with the aim of losing depth.

It’s puzzling that Cézanne used repoussoir quite traditionally in his painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire with a large Pine from 1886-87, where he frames the view with two straggly pines that reach out to one another at the top of the canvas.

Cézanne’s Le Lac d’Annecy is generally taken as the inception of his most radical style and approach to painting, during his late career. Compared against modern satellite images, the distance between the artist’s point of view and the Château de Duingt on the opposite side of the lake is 800 metres (just under half a mile), but it appears to be far closer than that despite the traditional repoussoir of a tree trunk on the left.

Cézanne was perhaps the first painter to use repoussoir to make a distant object look closer.