La Route tournante (Turn in the Road)

When the Boston collector John T. Spaulding lent this canvas to a Cézanne exhibition in New York in 1928, it was called Environs d'Aix, the country around the painter's home town in Provence, and it kept that name in shows at Harvard and Chicago over the next six years. The road is in fact at the other end of France. The catalogue of Cézanne's paintings now places it on the rue des Roches at Valhermeil, a hamlet of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris. From May to October 1881 Cézanne lived nearby at Pontoise, close to Camille Pissarro. That July Paul Gauguin, still a stockbroker who painted in his spare time, wrote to Pissarro asking, half joking, whether Cézanne had found the exact formula for a picture everyone would accept, and suggested slipping him a homeopathic drug so he would give it away in his sleep. Here a fence follows the road round from the left. Beyond the bend, as the museum points out, a patch of brown paint could be an upright fence hiding the white house or flat ground leading up to it.