Houses on a Hillside, 55×66 cm, 1874, held at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. This is one of Cézanne's earliest landscapes. During this period, he was like a student and friend to painter Camille Pissarro, becoming his lifelong close friend. From 1873 to 1876, they frequently went out painting together. The inspiration for Houses on a Hillside came from Pissarro’s landscape paintings of Louveciennes. Here, Cézanne, like an Impressionist painter, focused on bright light and atmosphere, but particularly on the arrangement of compositional forms. Starting from the rhythm of the central axis, it passes through vertical and diagonal elements—these tree trunks, corner lines, paths and footprints, as well as some roof curves. He used color changes with ease; like his friend Pissarro, the entire painting is quite solid and orderly, exploring initial geometric structures. Clearly, the landscapes Pissarro cared about were humanistic, with farmers present in all his painted scenes. In contrast, Cézanne’s landscapes are quite pure; houses or villages are treated as groups of geometric forms and structures, objects easily verified at a glance. From this landscape, which participated in the first Impressionist exhibition and was criticized as worthless, Cézanne gradually developed his unique modeling and style.