The François Zola Dam

In 1883, a year after a crash on the Paris stock exchange had cut his income as a stockbroker, Paul Gauguin decided to paint full time, and he went on buying other painters' work anyway. That summer he bought this landscape from Père Tanguy, the colour merchant whose shop was one of the few places in Paris to see a Cézanne, and wrote to Camille Pissarro about his unfinished view of the South. He took it with him to Copenhagen, lent it to an exhibition there in 1889, and copied it in gouache for the design of a fan. The title came later. In 1914 the Paris dealers Bernheim-Jeune showed it as the François Zola Dam, after the reservoir near Aix designed by the engineer François Zola, Émile Zola's father. No dam appears in the picture. The Cézanne catalogue raisonné places the view at L'Estaque, west of Marseille, with a strip of blue sea below the Marseilleveyre hills.