Landscape from Auvergne

Cezanne made almost no prints in his life, only five etchings, and all of them in a single stretch of 1873, in one house. That summer he was staying at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village north of Paris, near Doctor Paul Gachet, a physician and keen amateur etcher who kept a printing press and urged the painters around him to try it. Camille Pissarro and Armand Guillaumin were there too, bent over the copper. Cezanne picked up the etching needle here, scratched a few small landscapes in black line, and once he left this circle he never really took up printmaking again. This is one of those rare plates. The same Doctor Gachet would, years later, care for Vincent van Gogh through his final months. It is a modest thing in black ink, the trace of the one summer Cezanne worked metal instead of canvas.