La Ferme d'Auvers

In the 1870s Cézanne spent long stretches in the villages of Auvers and Pontoise, just north of Paris, working beside the older Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who taught him to lighten his palette and build a picture out of small, patient strokes. This farmyard comes out of those years. There is nothing grand in the subject, a corner of buildings, a bit of wall, some trees, yet Cézanne gives it an odd stillness and weight, as if an ordinary place were being taken very seriously. It is the same countryside where Van Gogh would spend his last months a decade later. The canvas is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.