The Plaster Mill

A tall building emerges between restless borders of foliage in Paul Cézanne’s The Plaster Mill . Its roof seems almost diagrammatically clear, yet the structure below it becomes difficult to disentangle from the dark, angular forms at its base.

This graphite drawing on paper is dated 1889–92 by the National Gallery of Art. ^[1]

The pleasure of the sheet lies in something more immediately available: measured edges and concentrated patches of pencil give the building weight while the surrounding vegetation stays in motion.

A Building Constructed in Lines

The upper outline is the drawing’s most economical part. A steep roof edge climbs towards the right before meeting a short horizontal stroke. On the left, another sloping roof settles behind it. Together these shapes establish two joined or overlapping masses without laboriously tracing every wall. The little dashes near the ridge and eaves are enough to keep the roof from becoming a flat geometric symbol. At the same time, the broad light areas inside the outline let the paper carry much of the apparent wall surface.

Below the roof, the façade is more carefully punctuated than filled in. Dark marks designate openings on two levels. Some are compact upright rectangles, while others are barely more than short strokes. Their imperfect alignment matters: the building remains legible as architecture, but the windows do not turn it into a rigid elevation. A nearly vertical line towards the right divides the wall into planes; on the left, a softer border allows the building to merge with adjacent marks. The eye repeatedly moves from the crisp opening back to a wall whose exact edge must be inferred.

The lower centre is denser and harder to name. Diagonals run beneath the building, cross one another, and meet upright strokes, suggesting a supported platform or framework. Cézanne presses this area darker than the roof. It becomes the visual hinge between the lofty wall and the heavily worked ground in front. One can see why a title involving a mill might seem apt, yet the drawing alone does not document the mechanism, function or precise construction of that dark assembly. It asks the viewer to read a relation of weights and supports before supplying an engineering description.

How the Foreground Alters the View

In the lower part of the image, parallel oblique strokes thicken into a broad band. Just left of centre, upright strokes interrupt it, while the bottom corners receive separate accumulations of pencil. The arrangement feels like an intervening enclosure or bank. Its marks do not describe a clearly bounded expanse of water. The drawing holds the viewer at a distance even as it brings the façade close enough to count its openings.

This foreground is important to the scale of the whole sheet. The near marks are comparatively large and dark; the roof is lightly held. That reversal keeps the building from floating against an empty page. It also means that the eye cannot simply travel in a straight path toward the structure. A screen of graphite has to be crossed first. The scene is built through successive interruptions: lower band, angular base, wall, roof and the irregular growth around them.

Trees, Blank Paper and Uneven Pressure

Vegetation enters from both sides. On the left, short diagonal groups gather around a trunk-like vertical passage. On the right, curved and angled strokes crowd the building more tightly. Near the top, a handful of small marks hover above the roof and keep the skyline from looking sealed. The foliage does not form a continuous frame. It appears in clusters separated by pale paper, so a viewer alternates between patches of density and unmarked intervals. Nothing in the visible leaf requires us to invent a botanical species or a particular season.

The graphite also changes character as it crosses the sheet. Roof edges are thin and exploratory; the openings have harder accents; the foreground contains wide fields of parallel hatching. Some lines cross at visibly different angles, and several forms seem to be tested twice. The lighter contours and heavier hatching make the image feel provisional without reducing it to a bare memorandum. We see successive choices about emphasis on one small sheet.

MoMA has described Cézanne’s drawn lines as searching, repeating and transforming. In the mill drawing, that movement can be followed from tentative roof edges to accumulating strokes below the building. ^[3]

A Specific Leaf in a Long-Used Sketchbook

The catalogue raisonné identifies this drawing as FWN 3015-01b , page I verso in the Washington sketchbook, also called Chappuis III. Its assigned date is 1889–92. The book as a whole is dated about 1877–1900. Page numbering records a position in the bound object, not the order in which Cézanne filled it. ^{[2] [4]}

The National Gallery counts 46 sheets and 71 drawings in the sketchbook; some sheets are blank, and other surfaces carry notes or calculations. Graphite, pen, brown ink and watercolor occur across the book. ^[5]

Charles S. Moffett’s original 1991 essay on the Mellon sketchbook argues that Cézanne reused pages without following a straightforward chronological sequence. Moffett mentions a different mill sketch on page XXVII verso, facing studies for The Judgment of Paris . That example is valuable for understanding the notebook’s disorder, but it is not this first-leaf drawing. Keeping the two mills apart prevents a mistaken date or neighboring subject from being imported into The Plaster Mill . ^[6]

A Title and an Image

The catalogue raisonné calls the sheet a “landscape known as” Le Moulin à plâtre and tags both factory and mill. It gives no site address. ^[2]

The view offers little of the world beyond the building. There is no drawn road leading towards it and no continuous horizon passing behind it. Small marks above the roofs suggest more growth, but they never gather into a distant landscape. The scene feels close and vertically compressed. The building takes up most of the available height; foliage occupies the leftover margins rather than opening a broad view around it. This limited field makes the shift between its pale wall and the crowded lower marks particularly forceful.

From Cézanne’s Family to Washington

The National Gallery traces the sketchbook through Cézanne’s son Paul, the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, Adrien Chappuis and Paul Mellon before the gift to Washington in 1991. It records the book in the 1991 Art for the Nation presentation and later exhibitions. ^{[1] [5]}