Le Meurtre

In the summer of 1870 France declared war on Prussia, and Cézanne left Paris for L'Estaque, a fishing village outside Marseille, where he sat out the conscription. He was 31 and painting like this, in thick dark slabs of colour, years before the pale landscapes most people picture when they hear his name. The subject was in the air around him. Cheap Paris papers ran murder cases in instalments like fiction, and his old schoolfriend from Aix, the novelist Émile Zola, had built Thérèse Raquin around a drowning three years earlier. The two attackers here have almost no faces. Only the victim's is finished, the mouth open and the head pushed back into the ground. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool bought the picture in 1964.