Cole And Cezanne: Mountains Of Difference - Assignment Example

Cole and Cezanne: Mountains of Difference Thomas Cole and Paul Cézanne both drew a mountain. Cole drew Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. Paul Cézanne drew Mont-Sainte-Victoire in France. The mountains are different, but not this different. Because they drew it a century apart, in two totally different art movements, Cole's Oxbow is evocative and more realistic, while Paul Cézanne's Mont-Sainte-Victoire is far more impressionist. Cole's Oxbow is drawn at a higher place and at a more flat angle.

He is basically looking straight out over the landscape. He uses a tree to establish distance, the angled tree leading off to the side of the canvas to give an illusion that there is more beyond. The arcing of the river makes an Omega shape. The composition puts one set of colors on one side, darker greens and brown, and the other on the right side, light greens, and blues. There's a storm color off to the left and blue colors to the right, keeping the dark to the light pattern. The Oxbow plays somewhat with perspective, with the far-off right side seeming much closer than it really would.

The river is slightly larger than it should be and the colors blend slightly into each other. But the painting is still pretty realistic, definitely depicting a scene. It's like an early nineteenth-century painting. Meanwhile, Mont-Sainte-Victoire has far less realistic composition and perspective. The perspective is totally flat-on, not slightly angled like Oxbow. Paul Cézanne presumably drew this on the mountain or from notes made on the mountain, but he didn't angle it down like he would be.

Instead, he made a different perspective, an unrealistic impressionistic one, which is like if you could view an entire countryside from the air, floating. The colors blend into each other. Shapes aren't completely formed, trees just suggested at. Cézanne is an impressionist, and it shows. The two mountains are both similar in terms of idea, but not in terms of composition. Two artists in the same state did different things because of a hundred years of art.