Die Brücke über die Marne bei Créteil

By 1894 Cezanne was in his fifties and mostly kept to Provence in the south, so it is a little surprising to find him here on the Marne, the quiet river just east of Paris. He painted the bridge at Creteil as two halves that answer each other. The wooded bank and the arch sit in the top, and the still water below holds their reflection almost exactly, the whole scene built from patient blocks of green. There are no people and no movement. Not long after, a Russian textile heir named Ivan Morozov bought it for his Moscow collection, in 1912. When that collection was nationalised after the revolution, the painting passed to the state, which is how a bridge near Paris ended up in the Pushkin Museum.