圣莫尔德福塞马什菲尔岛桥

Cezanne painted this loop of the Marne at Saint-Maur, just east of Paris, around 1895, the year a young dealer named Ambroise Vollard gave him his first solo show. Cezanne was in his mid-fifties by then and still largely unknown to the public, a painter other painters had begun to whisper about. You can see the method in the bridge. He builds the water, the bank and the ironwork out of small flat patches of colour, each laid beside the next like a tile, so the scene holds together as structure before it reads as a place. The little footbridge and the houses beyond are ordinary, the kind of suburb weekend Parisians reached by train, and he gives them the same patient attention he brought to his mountains in the south.