L'Estaque, the Village and the Sea

In the early 1880s L'Estaque was a working village on the bay of Marseille, and much of its living came from tiles and bricks. The chimneys of the tile works rose between the houses, and Cézanne did not leave them out. Two of them stand here above the red roofs, thin as pins against the pale strip of sea. The rest of the picture is built from the hillside itself, terraced fields in long green and ochre bands, with a sandy path climbing the right edge. Scholars usually date it to about 1882, though some place it a few years either side.

The canvas has its own later history. In 1921 it hung in Berlin, in a Paul Cassirer exhibition of Cézannes owned in Germany, lent by the collector Margarete Oppenheim. By around 1940 it belonged to Siegfried Rosengart, the Lucerne art dealer whose family collection is now the museum where it hangs.