Der Golf von Marseille, gesehen von L'Estaque

L'Estaque was a fishing village on the edge of Marseille where Cezanne kept returning through the 1870s and 1880s, painting the same bay perhaps 20 times. He had first hidden out there as a young man to dodge the draft during the war of 1870, and he came to love the hard southern light. He described it to his friend Pissarro as being like a playing card, red roofs laid flat against the blue sea, the sun so strong that things seemed cut out in colour. You can see him testing that in this view from around 1885, the water pressed up into a solid blue wall behind the tiled roofs. Marseille was a booming industrial port by then, and its factory chimneys edge quietly into the far shore.