Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L'Estaque

By the early 1880s Cezanne had mostly walked away from Paris and kept going back to L'Estaque, a fishing village on the bay just west of Marseille, where the light is hard and the hills are bare rock. That is what you get here, a cluster of Provencal farmhouses with ochre walls and red-tiled roofs, set on a shelf of ground above the dry Riaux valley. He cared less about a pretty view than about how the place was built. The houses settle into plain blocks, the slopes flatten into planes of colour, and the whole thing locks together like stonework. About 25 years later Braque came to this same coast and broke it into facets, and people reached for a new word, cubism. Cezanne painted this around 1883, and Paul Mellon gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.