El pino en L'Estaque

L'Estaque was a fishing village across the bay from Marseille, with tile works and a scatter of red roofs up the hillside. Cézanne first went there in 1870 to sit out the Franco-Prussian war. He had been called up, did not report, and was listed as a defaulter while he painted. He kept going back for the next 15 years. This canvas is from about 1875, and what it carries is Camille Pissarro, who had been working beside him at Pontoise and Auvers. The pine trunk running the full height of the picture and the low wall along the bottom both come from those sessions, and the middle distance is simply left out. The painting came to the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1963, with the collection Domenica Walter had built with her husband, the dealer Paul Guillaume.