View of Mt. Marseilleveyre and the Isle of Maire (L'Estaque)

By 1880 Cezanne had been climbing this hillside above L'Estaque for a decade. He first came in 1870, dodging the draft as France fought Prussia, and kept returning to the fishing village west of Marseille for years after. Writing to his friend the painter Pissarro, he once described what he saw here as flat as a playing card, red roofs against the blue of the bay under a sun so hard it seemed to cut everything into colored shapes. This view looks across the water to the far edge of that world: the dry mass of Mount Marseilleveyre and, off its tip, the small bare rock of the Isle of Maire. The village below was filling with tile works and factory chimneys in these years, and he left every one of them out.