Дом перед горой Сент-Виктуар близ Гарданны (Дом в Провансе)

By the late 1880s Cézanne had largely left Paris and the Impressionist circle behind and settled back into the country around Aix, in the south of France. This is that country. A plain farmhouse sits among rolling fields, and behind it rises the pale grey-blue ridge of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the limestone mountain he would paint again and again for the rest of his life. What he is doing here is quieter than a view. Notice how the house, the hills and the mountain are all built from the same short, blocky strokes of muted green and brown and blue, so the near wall and the far ridge feel made of one material. He is not trying to fool your eye into distance. He is fitting the whole landscape together like masonry, flattening it into something solid and constructed. That habit of treating a scene as a set of interlocking planes is what a younger generation, Picasso and Braque among them, would seize on twenty years later. The painting later passed through the dealer Ambroise Vollard before reaching Indianapolis, where it hangs today.