This painting by Georges Braque depicts houses in the village of L'Estaque. It is one of the earliest Cubist works, simplifying forms into geometric blocks without traditional perspective or distinction between foreground and background. Braque eliminates details and reduces foliage to reveal the geometric structure of the houses. The limited color palette and composition of intersecting lines and planes helped establish Braque's signature Analytical Cubism style.

1. Houses at L’Estaque
Georges Braque, 1908, oil on canvas,
Museum of Fine Arts, Berne,
Switzerland

2. Background
• Painted in the
summer of 1908 at
L’Estaque
• Braque’s idol
Cézanne had painted
before him
• One of the earliest
and “truly cubist”
works for the formal
analysis and
abstraction of
objects and space
• Rejected by the
Salon d'Automne
• Fortunately
exhibited that
autumn at Daniel-
Henri Kahnweiler's
Paris gallery.
• Painted from a
photograph of a
view that Braque
had L’Estaque
(photo taken by
Kahnweiler,
Picasso’s dealer at
the time)
• While Picasso’s
"Les Demoiselles“
(1907) cleared the
ground, Cubism
was a joint
construction. Both
artists went on to
a new approach to
organising
pictorial space
that is Cubism.

3. Type of Cubism
• Analytical Cubism because…
- High concentration of geometric forms
- Scale and perspective have disappeared;
forms are simplified into blocks
- No distinction between foreground and
background; the shapes of the painting seem to
be stacked on top of each other
- Use of mutes greys, browns and ocres.
- Analytical Cubism was mostly practised by
Braque.

4. Subject
• Braque depicts the houses of a French fishing village
not far from Marseille.
• All details have been eliminated and the foliage of the
trees reduced to a minimum to reveal the geometric
severity of the houses.
• Analytical Cubism allows the form and colour of the
houses to be simplified down to the appearance of
cardboard boxes
• Also allowed Braque to take full possession of he saw
and invented a non-naturalistic way of representing
things and expressing spatial relationships.
• The cliff and the houses further up the painting are
treated as a continuous limiting background plane:
we can’t tell where one finishes and the other starts.

5. Use of light and colour
• Analytical Cubism uses a limited colour palette of
mostly dark and muted colours
• Although the plane appears to be flat, tonal intensity
does vary across the plane and is clearly seen through
the use of vigorous brushstrokes
• Colour is not used descriptively, nor atmospherically:
analytical cubism means the colours and tones of
objects are depicted darker than they are in reality.
• Here, the atmosphere looks similar to that of a storm
in the autumn when it was actually painted in the
summer, most likely on a clear day
• The brown and green palette also predicts a palette
that Braque employed in many paintings to come, eg
“Violin and Pitcher” (1910)

6. Composition
These simple landscape
paintings showed Braque's
determination to break
imagery into dissected
parts.
The trees continue
upwards almost to the top
of the canvas so that the
eye is allowed to escape
beyond them
There is no central
vanishing point; in many
of the houses, all the
canons of traditional
perspective are
completely broken
The picture plane is
further emphasized by
the complete lack of
aerial perspective (the far
houses are, darker and
stronger in value than the
foreground house) The
fact that occasionally
contours (outlines) are
broken and forms opened
up into each other.
Distances between one
point and another are
expressed by lines,
forming a structure of
verticals, diagonals and
horizontals to guide the
eye and hold the
composition together
The tress also act as a
frame around the
houses

7. Summary…
• Braque mostly practiced
Analytical Cubism
• Forms have been reduced
to a minimum to reveal
the geometric forms
• No sense of scale or
perspective
• No central point
• The composition has a
variety of linear
emphasises
• The colour palette for this
piece paves the way for
Braque’s future works.