Le Cabanon de Jourdan

In the autumn of 1906 Cézanne was already an old man who went out almost every day to paint in the countryside around Aix-en-Provence, ground he had known for decades. This small stone hut belonged to a local man named Jourdan, and the painter set up his easel in front of it that season. On the 13th of October he wrote to his son that he was still working there. Two days later a storm caught him out in the open. He collapsed, fell ill with pneumonia, and died a little over a week later, on the 22nd of October. Many scholars think this is the last landscape he completed. Look at how it is built. Blocks of green and warm ochre are laid down like tiles, and a scaffolding of darker lines holds them in place. For a lifetime he had worked to make those separate patches settle into one continuous surface, and across the low wall and the field around it they finally do, with almost no seam left showing.