How did Georges Braque's paintings of L'Estaque challenge traditional perspective?

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van de Velde, Adriaen: River Landscape in the Late Afternoon — Landscape painting *River Landscape in the Late Afternoon*, oil on canvas by Adriaen van de Velde, 1663; in a private collection.

Georges Braque’s 1908 landscape paintings of L’Estaque, such as Houses at L’Estaque, were pivotal in challenging traditional perspective by moving away from illusionistic representation. Influenced by Paul Cézanne, Braque reduced natural forms to geometric, cylindrical shapes and utilized colourful tilted planes to construct the image.1

These works pushed beyond Cézanne’s approach by employing slab volumes and warped perspective, which effectively flattened the pictorial space. By breaking down contours and rejecting the singular, fixed viewpoint required by traditional linear perspective, Braque began the formal breakdown of space that would define the Analytical phase of Cubism. This radical departure treated the canvas as an autonomous object rather than a window into a three-dimensional scene, fundamentally altering the history of painting.1