Vista do Domaine Saint-Joseph

Cézanne painted this hillside near Aix-en-Provence in the late 1880s, the Jesuit estate of Saint-Joseph on a slope he had known since boyhood. He even signed it, which he rarely did, though he still left patches of bare canvas showing through. The real drama came later. In 1913 the picture hung in the Armory Show in New York, the exhibition that first threw modern European art at a startled American public. Many visitors came to laugh at the moderns. The Metropolitan bought this one straight off the walls for 6,700 dollars, the highest price paid for anything in the show, which made it the first Cézanne to enter an American museum.