The Bay of Marseilles, Seen from L'Estaque

By the 1880s L'Estaque, the little port west of Marseille where Cezanne kept coming back, was no longer just a fishing village. Tile and brick works were spreading along the shore, and if you look at the roofs in the foreground you can pick out factory chimneys among them. Years earlier Cezanne had told his friend Pissarro that the view here was like a playing card, red roofs against the blue sea, the southern sun so hard that everything stood out in flat silhouette. That is close to what he does in this canvas. He stacks the town, the bay, the far hills and the sky into broad bands, and he is after their solid shape rather than the shimmer of light the Impressionists chased. The water is worked almost as densely as the land it meets.