The Road Bridge at L'Estaque

L'Estaque was a small fishing and industrial village on the coast near Marseille, and Cézanne kept going back to it for years. He had first hidden there in 1870 to avoid being called up during the war with Prussia, and later returned to work in peace, away from the Paris art world that had little use for him. This view of the road bridge dates from around 1882. He builds the hillside, the pines and the houses out of short parallel strokes laid side by side, so the whole surface holds together as one worked fabric. When a Finnish collector bought the painting in 1911, young painters in Helsinki studied those brushmarks closely.