Rocks, L'Estaque

This one is early. Around 1865 Cezanne was 26, unknown, moving between Aix-en-Provence and Paris, drawing at the Academie Suisse and being refused by the Salon jury year after year. L'Estaque, a fishing village on the bay west of Marseille, was one of the places he went to work outdoors.

The canvas is tiny, 21 by 33 centimetres, put down fast and in hard contrasts of light and dark, which is why the Israel Museum reads it as painted on the spot rather than worked up indoors. He was arguing the point in his letters around then. He told his old schoolfriend Emile Zola that pictures painted inside, in the studio, would never be as good as the things done outside.

He kept coming back to L'Estaque for the next 20 years, by which time tile works and factory chimneys had reached the village and got into the paintings as well.