In the first of these articles, I explained how landscape painting came to France in a roundabout fashion via Paul Bril, Poussin and Claude, then via Claude-Joseph Vernet to Valenciennes. This was to set the context for two articles commemorating the bicentenary of Achille Michallon, who was the next link in the chain.

Among Michallon’s early plein air studies is this of The Fallen Branch, Fontainebleau from about 1816, which looks characteristic of the Barbizon School. This isn’t perhaps surprising when you know that Michallon’s most successful pupil was Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), the next link in a chain that ultimately takes us to Paul Cézanne, the objective of this article.

Corot was born and brought up in a bourgeois family living in Paris. Showing no signs of any particular talent at school, he was apprenticed to a draper, and worked in the trade until he was 26. He started painting landscapes, and when he was receiving a comfortable annual allowance from his parents, in 1822, set up his studio on the Quai Voltaire in Paris. For a relatively brief period before his teacher’s untimely death, Corot studied under Michallon.

Corot followed the established training when he spent the years from 1825-8 painting ferociously in the Roman Campagna, where his technique developed very rapidly. His subsequent studio work concentrated on preparing finished landscapes for the Salon, but from 1829 he started to paint en plein air around the town of Barbizon and the Forest of Fontainebleau, to the south-east of Paris. There he met Théodore Rousseau, Constant Troyon, Millet, Daubigny, and Paul Huet, forming the Barbizon School, an important precursor to early Impressionism.

Corot painted this View of the Convent of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum, Rome early in his first stay in Italy, and The Toutain Farm, Honfleur (below) from about 1845 is a fine example of where his art took him, over the next couple of decades.

Corot was in turn the teacher of Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), thus became a grandfather of Impressionism. Pissarro had been born and brought up on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, and in 1855 moved to Paris, where he worked as assistant to Anton Melbye, then a successful artist in the city. Pissarro tried classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Suisse, but developed best with instruction from Camille Corot.

Pissarro quickly became an almost compulsive painter of trees, and in his Forest Path from about 1859 worked in good Barbizon style. That year he had his first painting accepted for the Salon, and at the Académie Suisse met Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin, and others who were to form the Impressionist movement. He started travelling further afield, specialising in landscapes, and painting extensively en plein air, but never made the pilgrimage to the Roman Campagna. Instead, he developed his Impressionist style painting in company with the likes of Paul Cézanne.

There are a few instances where corresponding paintings by Cézanne and Pissarro have survived, where it appears probable that they were painted in front of the same motif and at the same time. One of the best-known pairs is Cézanne’s La Côte Saint-Denis à Pontoise (c 1877) below, and Pissarro’s Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise (1877) above.

Cézanne shows little or no anatomical basis to the construction of his trees, whose branches are only loosely related to foliage, whereas Pissarro presents us with an essay on the form and structure of trunks and branches. Cézanne simplifies throughout: he shows little or no texture, and more basic shadows, on the trunks, and the foliage is depicted as amorphous areas of leaf colour. Pissarro captures texture in everything, from the smoother surface of the track to the smaller branches.

Pissarro became a Divisionist for a few years, using pointillist technique, but eventually returned to finely detailed and textured trees in shimmering settings.

Painted only two years later, Cézanne’s Le Lac d’Annecy is generally taken as the inception of his most radical style and approach to painting, developed during his late career. The opposite shore of the lake is about 800 metres (just under half a mile) away but appears much closer. While the artist uses the traditional technique of repoussoir, his brushstrokes are far from conventional.

Cézanne’s final oil paintings are generally seen as precursors of Cubism and modernism, in that form almost breaks down completely, and the painting is dominated by patches of colour laid down using the constructive stroke, as seen in Wood (1900–2). The only indication that there are trees here are sporadic passages of drawn trunks and fragments of branches.

Although many of Cézanne’s earlier Impressionist paintings were made in northern France, in the environs of Paris, he was part of the movement to the south of the country, in the Midi. This completes its movement from Antwerp to Rome, then to Paris, finally ending up close to the Mediterranean coast, a journey that had taken almost three centuries.