At the Water's Edge

Around 1890, when Cézanne painted this river view, he had never had a one-man show. That came only in 1895, at the gallery of a young Paris dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who then sold canvases straight from the painter's studio. This one looks stopped midway. The buildings on the bank and on the river are reduced to a few blocky shapes, the brushwork is loose, and bare canvas shows through in wide patches. The National Gallery of Art suggests Cézanne may still have been weighing his next stroke when he set it aside.

Probably through Vollard, it went to Egisto Fabbri, an American-born painter living in Florence and one of Cézanne's earliest collectors. In 1938 Averell Harriman, later governor of New York, and his wife Marie, who ran a gallery in Manhattan, bought it through the dealer Paul Rosenberg. Their foundation gave it to the National Gallery in 1972, in her memory.