Le Golfe de Marseille vu de l'Estaque

Cezanne had first described this spot to his old teacher Pissarro back in 1876, calling it like a playing card, red roofs over the blue sea, the sun so fierce that things stood out in flat blocks of colour. A decade later he painted it much that way. He stacks the view in bands, the tiled roofs of the fishing village, the hard blue water, the ridge of hills, the sky, and lets the bay sit up flat like a wall rather than sink into distance. Where his Impressionist friends chased the passing light, he was after the thing underneath, the structure that holds a view together. Two decades on, a young Braque set up to paint these same hills, and it was the canvases he carried back from L'Estaque that first got a critic to reach for the word cubism.