Country House by a River

By 1890 Cézanne had mostly withdrawn from the Paris art world that once rejected him, painting quietly in Provence and, for five months that year, travelling through Switzerland with his family. This calm view belongs to that settled middle age. A band of water holds you back from the far bank, and the house across it is built from a few blunt geometric blocks, framed by trees whose foliage he lays down in patient, overlapping strokes rather than detail. He is less interested in the particular house than in how solid forms sit in space, the habit of construction that younger painters would soon name Cubism. The canvas came to Jerusalem from the collection of Miriam de Rothschild, a daughter of Baron Edmond de Rothschild.