Legendary scene

By around 1878 Paul Cézanne had largely turned away from invented subjects. Working beside the older painter Camille Pissarro near Pontoise, and down south at L'Estaque, he was teaching himself to build a picture out of what actually stood before him, apples, rooftops, a bare hillside. That makes this imagined scene unusual for these years. Its dark, romantic feeling belongs more to the literary fantasies he had painted in his twenties than to the sober landscapes around it. The horseman is traditionally said to be Sancho Panza, the squire from Cervantes' novel Don Quixote, though nobody can be sure the figure is really him. The canvas is small and has stayed in private hands ever since.