Il viadotto de l'Estaque

L'Estaque was a small place on the coast near Marseille, dry hills dropping toward the sea, and Cezanne kept coming back to it. He painted this in 1882. He was after the structure of the place rather than a pretty view, so he builds the steep, sun-baked slope out of blunt planes of ochre and green, and lets the new railway viaduct run across the middle, its arches stepping off to the right. Space turns a little strange here, near and far pressed into one plane, and it is this way of stacking a landscape that Picasso and Braque would pick up a generation later. That winter Cezanne did not work alone. His old friend Renoir had come south and set up beside him, and a canvas Renoir made of the same rocky ground sits close enough in time to help date this one.