At the Water's Edge

A riverbank dissolves into shimmering patches of green, blue, and soft white in this late work by Paul Cézanne, painted near the close of the 1800s. Trees, water, and a small house all seem to melt into one another, and the reflection below feels every bit as real as the leaves above. If you search the middle of the canvas, you will find a little house half swallowed by foliage, giving away its location with just a flash of red roof on the right. By this point in his life, Cézanne cared less about copying a scene exactly and more about how colors and shapes could hold together on their own.

His method was famously patient. He built each scene from small strokes of color set beside one another, sometimes leaving bare canvas showing through, and none of that was an accident. Cézanne wanted to turn the fleeting quality of Impressionism into something he described as "solid and lasting," and that ambition shows in every deliberate mark. Younger artists such as Picasso and Matisse pored over paintings like this one and ended up calling him the father of modern art. A calm stretch of water may seem like a modest subject, yet the ideas worked out here rippled far beyond the riverbank and reshaped what painting could be.