The Garden at Les Lauves (Le Jardin des Lauves)

By 1906 Cézanne was 67, ill with diabetes, and spending his days at the studio he had built five years earlier on the hill of Les Lauves, just north of Aix-en-Provence. He chose the spot for its view, and this canvas looks out from there across his garden. It belongs to the last months of his life, and he never finished it. Wide stretches of bare canvas are left between the strokes. What holds the picture together is a stack of horizontal bands, green and ochre at the bottom, then violet and blue, rising from the grass to the sky. Cézanne had written to the young painter Émile Bernard that lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, while nature, for us, is more depth than surface. In October 1906 he was caught in a storm while painting outdoors, and he died about a week later.