River Bend (Coin de Riviere)

Around 1865 the young painters in Paris were arguing about what deserved to be painted at all. The Realists said any ordinary patch of countryside would do, and the Israel Museum reads this small canvas as Cézanne, then in his mid-twenties, taking them at their word. There is no famous view here. Just a bend of dark water, a shelf of rock, a clump of trees and a heavy grey sky. The Cézanne catalogue raisonné notes that much of the paint went on with a palette knife, and the white ripples in the foreground sit on the canvas in thick ridges. After a London auction in 1959 the picture belonged to Sam Spiegel, the film producer behind The Bridge on the River Kwai, and his collection came to Jerusalem in 1993.