Bords d'une rivière

By 1904 Cezanne was 65 and painting mostly out of doors around Aix, two years from the end of his life. This riverbank is built almost entirely from separate patches of color laid side by side, a golden-brown bank in front, a darker blue-green band for the water, and behind it the massed shapes of buildings. Look into that far bank and a few factory chimneys stand among the trees, a reminder that even his quiet southern rivers had industry creeping along their edges. The canvas is left loosely worked, bare in places between the strokes, the way many of his last landscapes were. He was no longer covering every inch. Each block of color reads as a slow, weighed decision about exactly where a thing sits in space.