Pont des Trois Sautets

A pale bridge curves across the upper half of Cézanne’s Pont des Trois Sautets . Its underside is a strong brown arc, yet the bridge above it seems almost to disappear into the light. Below, small washes of green, rose and violet mingle with restless pencil lines. The water, banks and trees emerge from a mesh of marks.

Made around 1906 and now in the Cincinnati Art Museum, the sheet treats a familiar crossing near Aix-en-Provence as a problem of colour, line and space. ^[1]

The arch and the view beneath it

The bridge supplies the clearest single shape in the sheet. Its upper parapet passes behind the foliage at the left, rises gently, and falls toward a thick tree trunk on the right. A dark band immediately below it gives the white body of the bridge an edge. Cézanne has left much of that body as the paper’s own light tone, with only scattered marks crossing it. The span therefore reads at once as masonry and as an opening within the watercolour’s busy surface.

The right-hand tree has a different task. Its upright trunk cuts across the arch, interrupting the bridge’s easy sweep. Thin branches rise beyond it and spread towards the upper edge, while short diagonal strokes near its base link it to the foliage below. The trunk is never a uniform brown column: red and ochre passages mingle with exposed paper and darker graphite. It anchors the view without shutting out what lies behind it. At the left, foliage and slender trees partly veil the bridge, shifting its apparent distance.

At the bottom of the sheet, small angular washes accumulate in greens, dull oranges and purples. Several pencil marks run across or between them. Rather than tracing a neat riverbank and filling it with colour, Cézanne lets one patch answer another; a red accent low in the centre recurs higher in the foliage, and violet reappears in both shadow and water. The boundary between a tree, its reflection and the bank remains elusive, even as the drawing keeps the bridge legible.

A working place beside the Arc

The bridge crossed the Arc River near Aix. Cézanne’s correspondence places him at the Pont des Trois Sautets during the exceptional heat of August 1906: on 14 August he told his son Paul that a carriage would take him there in the late afternoon, when the riverside was cooler, and that he had already begun a watercolour. In September he continued describing trips to the river and the wealth of motifs he found along its banks. These letters establish a working routine at this place, although they do not prove that the watercolour mentioned on 14 August is precisely the Cincinnati sheet. ^[3]

The Cincinnati Art Museum’s extended object description places the artist immediately below the bridge and reports several tack holes in the paper’s corners, evidence of repeated attachment during work. It describes a pencil framework followed by transparent, overlapping colour washes. Those observations indicate work over more than one encounter. The museum also identifies red-violet touches in the water and a concentration of blue-violet in the shaded distance. ^[4]

John Rewald’s account of Cézanne’s last Aix motifs describes the shaded bank by the old, narrow bridge as a retreat from summer heat. He places it among several outdoor working places, including another stretch of the Arc on the route towards Les Milles. The river in a late letter is therefore not automatically the river in this particular view. The named bridge in the August letter provides the firmer connection. ^[5]

Pencil, wash and changing relations

The sheet is far from an architectural record of the crossing. Pencil lines repeatedly search through the vegetation; some tighten the outlines of trunks, while others remain visible beneath or beside transparent colour. On the bridge, those lines define an edge that pigment alone scarcely fixes. Elsewhere a brush mark may carry the form for a moment before a graphite stroke redirects it. This shifting partnership is why the arch can feel firm without becoming rigid, and why the surrounding vegetation can remain legible without being reduced to a map of individual leaves.

The exposed paper is just as active. White flecks break through the thicket at the left, broad light fills the bridge, and smaller untouched gaps flicker among the low colour patches. Each gap changes according to its neighbours: beside the dark underside of the arch it suggests strong illumination, while amid foliage it resembles light filtering through branches. The Museum of Modern Art’s account of Cézanne’s landscape drawings notes his use of transparent washes and unpainted paper to register light; here those methods can be followed across one small sheet, from the open bridge to the crowded river edge. ^[6]

The arch’s large curve gains force from the straight tree that crosses it, while scattered rose and violet touches connect foreground to background. Lawrence Gowing, writing about the late work, saw the bridge watercolour’s linear strength and mild luminosity as joined rather than competing effects. Geneviève Monnier likewise proposed that reflected light helps structure this particular view. Their readings bring attention back to the surface, where line and wash repeatedly exchange roles. ^[5]

One bridge, more than one solution

Cézanne had painted the same bridge decades earlier, in an oil landscape usually dated 1865–66. That early work approaches the crossing from a different angle and belongs to a very different use of paint; it should not be mistaken for a preliminary version of the Cincinnati watercolour. The long interval instead shows a return to a place whose shapes could support new pictorial questions. In the late sheet, the bridge is seen obliquely, partly screened by trees, its broad pale mass held in tension with a foreground of mobile marks. ^[7]

That mobility has prompted debate over how to read Cézanne’s revisions. Paul Smith identifies the Cincinnati sheet when discussing the notion that Cézanne combined successive physical viewpoints in a single image. He accepts that some pentimenti could correspond to slightly different views, but argues that such adjustments cannot by themselves prove a record of vision unfolding as the painter moved. It is a useful caution here. The multiple contours visible around the trees are evidence of searching and adjustment; their exact sequence or purpose cannot be reconstructed simply by looking at the reproduction. The bridge’s coherence comes from the relations built on the page, whatever movements may have preceded them. ^[8]

The Cincinnati sheet holds a particular balance: the arch remains recognisable, the tree blocks and reveals it, and the riverbank’s coloured fragments resist settling into a single depth. A viewer can return to the same few marks and see the crossing alternately as a structure in landscape and as a rhythm across paper.

From Cézanne’s studio to Cincinnati

The catalogue traces the sheet from Ambroise Vollard in Paris through his estate, then Rosenberg & Stiebel in New York and John J. Emery in Cincinnati. Emery’s gift brought it to the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1951. The same catalogue records its appearance in exhibitions of French drawings and Cézanne watercolours, including Cézanne: The Late Work in 1977–78, Cézanne in Provence in 2006, and Cézanne Drawing in 2021. Those appearances show how the work has been considered both as a study of a specific Provençal site and as an important example of drawing with colour. ^[2]

Its two media remain visible rather than dissolving into one another. The graphite can be followed as a sequence of decisions, and the watercolour as transparent pools and patches that modify those decisions. The bridge fixes the image’s centre even as the marks keep asking where one form ends and another begins.