The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque

Cezanne painted The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque around 1885, during one of his visits to the fishing village of L'Estaque, on the coast west of Marseille. He had been coming to L'Estaque since the 1860s, when he fled Paris to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, and he returned repeatedly over the next two decades. The village was perched on a hill above the bay, with views of the Mediterranean and the mountains of the Marseilleveyre to the south. Cezanne painted at least six views of the bay from different points in the village, and this version is the most ambitious. The painting shows the bay of Marseille from a terrace in L'Estaque, with the red roofs of the village in the foreground, the blue water of the bay in the middle ground, and the mountains in the distance. The composition is built in horizontal bands: the red roofs at the bottom, the blue water in the center, and the green and blue mountains at the top. The colors are warm and saturated, with the reds of the roofs and the blues of the water creating a strong contrast across the center of the canvas. Cezanne's landscapes from L'Estaque are the paintings that first brought him to the attention of the younger generation. In 1894, the critic Gustave Geffroy visited Cezanne at Aix and wrote about the L'Estaque paintings, calling them 'the most representative works of the new vision.' The paintings were shown in Paris in the late 1890s, and they were seen by Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, who studied them as models for a new kind of landscape painting. The L'Estaque paintings were the direct inspiration for Braque's early Cubist landscapes, painted in 1907-08, which were also set in the village. Cezanne's method at L'Estaque was to paint from a fixed position, building the landscape in patches of color that described the forms without drawing them. He wrote to Pissarro in 1876: 'It is so beautiful here that it is like looking at a picture, and I have only to close my eyes to see it.' The painting is built from this sustained looking: each shape in the landscape is rendered as a patch of color, with the forms described by the relationship between the patches rather than by outline or modeling. Oil on canvas, 80 by 100 centimeters. Cezanne painted with short, directional strokes, building the roofs in warm reds and oranges, the water in cool blues and greens, and the mountains in layered strokes of blue and violet. The trees that frame the view at the left are painted in thick, vertical strokes of dark green. The surface has the dense, worked quality of a painting built over many sessions, with each patch of color adjusted and readjusted until the relationships between them were right. The horizontal format and warm palette make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or office. The reds, blues, and greens pair with white walls, natural wood, and rooms with a Mediterranean or warm mood. The 18x24 size is the best choice, as the composition needs width to read. The painting has a structured, monumental quality that suits rooms with a serious or architectural mood. The painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection in 1933, as part of the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection. This is a public domain artwork, scanned from the original at the Art Institute of Chicago. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.