Mühle an der Couleuvre bei Pontoise

Cezanne spent May to October 1881 at Pontoise, north of Paris, where Pissarro lived, painting beside him as he had done years earlier. The mill on the little river Couleuvre came out of that stay, and it is put together the way he had begun to put everything together, flat to the viewer, the depth made by stacking uprights and horizontals rather than by leading the eye back into the distance. In June 1897 Hugo von Tschudi, who ran the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, bought it from the dealer Durand-Ruel in Paris. It was the first Cezanne to enter a public collection, and hanging a living French modernist in a Prussian state gallery drew protests in the Prussian parliament and complaints that went up to the Kaiser.