Landscape

Jean Charles Cazin, a painter of the flattened, soft-toned country of the Pas-de-Calais, closes the century with a landscape that trades the crispness of plein-air for a veiled, almost elegiac atmosphere. A low horizon, muted fields and a sky without incident are held together by a continuous, delicate tonality that muffles every edge — a calm echo of Corot passed through a Symbolist temperament. Painted near the end of Cazin’s life, around 1895, it is the work of an artist who made understatement his whole method, and it foreshadows the tonal quiet of the Nabis. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.