Gardanne

In the mid-1880s, Paul Cézanne settled with his family in Gardanne, a quiet hill town in the south of France, and this painting captures the view that greeted him each day. The village climbs its slope in a stack of terracotta roofs and pale stone walls, crowned by a bell tower at the very top. Warm ochre hills stretch out around the town, broken here and there by trees and touches of green. Everything about the scene feels still and slow, as though the afternoon sun has settled over the whole hillside.

Cézanne had a particular way of looking at the world, and it shows here. He treated the houses almost like solid blocks and cubes, fitting them together into a tidy architecture of shapes. That idea of reducing things to their simplest forms was well ahead of its time, and it later gave younger painters like Picasso a starting point for Cubism. This is exactly why Cézanne is often described as the link between the Impressionists and the modern art that came after them.

His brushwork stays loose throughout, and in a few spots near the edges you can spot bare canvas peeking through. That was no accident. Cézanne built his pictures patch by patch and simply stopped when he felt he had grabbed hold of what counted. The result is a plain and heartfelt view of a place he was happy to spend his days.