The House of Doctor Gachet at Auvers-sur-Oise

In 1872 Cezanne left Paris for the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of the city, and worked there beside the older painter Camille Pissarro, who coaxed his heavy, dark palette open into daylight. This is one result. It shows the house of Doctor Paul Gachet, a physician settled in Auvers who liked the company of painters and collected their work. Gachet has a second claim on memory. 18 years later, in 1890, it was he who looked after Vincent van Gogh through the last weeks of his life, in this same quiet village. Cezanne painted the house more than once, and this version, long held in the Staechelin collection in Basel, sets it into its hillside garden with short, bright, deliberate strokes. The airless gloom of his first landscapes is gone, replaced by the flecked, working daylight he took from Pissarro that year.