The Bellevue Plain, also called The Red Earth (La Plaine de Bellevue, dit aussi Les Terres Rouges)

Painted c.1891 from the Bellevue property belonging to his brother-in-law Maxime Conil, southwest of Aix, this landscape takes its title from the distinctive red-ochre earth of the Provençal terrain. The Bellevue plain offered Cézanne a wide-angle view of the valley, with Mont Sainte-Victoire visible in the distance — the same mountain he would paint obsessively in his final years. In this work the red earth occupies the foreground as an intense chromatic element, creating a warm counterpoint to the cool greens of vegetation and blues of the sky.

The vivid orange-red of the Provençal soil dominates the foreground plane, applied in rich impasto strokes that differ in texture from the more thinly worked sky. Cézanne uses this colour contrast — warm earth against cool sky — as his primary structural device. The transition zones between terrain and vegetation are handled with his characteristic passage technique, edges blending without dissolving.