Perhaps the most influential of nineteenth-century artists on later, modernist trends, Paul Cézanne had developed by the 1890s a style that added to his characteristically tight-knit and structured compositions a deft, blurred brushwork that translated into woven patterns his perceptions of the dynamic play of light, space, color and shape. This approach is fully apparent in Forest Interior, painted about 1898-1899. Here the sloping, rounded forms of rocks, the vertical tree trunks, and the diagonal limbs present a solid substructure against which Cézanne added the looser handling of sky, foliage and foreground vegetation. All individual elements of composition are treated as unites or tesserae carefully nestled together into an overall mosaic of form. Cézanne created throughout a masterful orchestration of balanced movements, tonal gradation and textural contrasts.

Although the preponderance of Cézanne's late landscapes depict sites around his native Aix in the South of France, he occasionally before 1900 worked in the North as well, and the setting of Forest Interior remains debatable. Most scholars relate it to works Cézanne painted on the forested slopes surrounding the so-called Château-Noir near Aix, while others hold that the site is the Forest of Fontainbleau in the North.

-Steven A. Nash, Masterworks of European Painting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1999)