Gardanne (Horizontal View) (Gardanne [vue horizontale])

Cézanne painted this around 1885 in Gardanne, a small hill town a few miles from his home in Aix-en-Provence. What drew him was the way the place was built: ochre houses stacked up the slope in plain cubic blocks, climbing toward the church tower at the top. He treats each building as a facet, letting walls and roofs lock together into a single quarried mass, the whole town reduced to angles and light. Painters noticed. About twenty years later Braque and Picasso would take exactly this kind of faceting much further, and historians often point back to the Gardanne pictures as an early sign of it. This is the horizontal version, with a band of open ground across the front. It hangs today at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.