Au bord de l'étang (O lago)

In April 1877 Cézanne hung 16 pictures at the third impressionist exhibition in Paris, and the reviewers who bothered with him mostly used him as the joke of the show. He never exhibited with the group again. The Boston museum dates this canvas to about 1877 to 1879, which is exactly when he began putting paint down in short parallel strokes all leaning the same way, so that the water, the bank and the trees are built out of one repeated unit. The figures at the edge of the pond are set against the landscape rather than folded into it. Joining those two things was what he was still working at nearly 30 years later in the last bathers.