Rocks, Pines and Sea at l Estaque

Cezanne first came to L'Estaque in 1870 in order to disappear. France had gone to war with Prussia, he was 31 and of an age to be called up, and he sat the war out in that fishing village west of Marseille, listed as a draft evader. He kept coming back for the next 20 years. In 1876 he wrote to Pissarro from there that the place was like a playing card, red roofs against the blue sea, and that the sun was so hard that things seemed cut out in silhouette. This canvas is from the middle of the 1880s, when he was building the coast out of short parallel strokes and flat planes of colour. The Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe hangs three of his L'Estaque views together, painted across about a decade.