The Garden at Les Lauves (Le Jardin des Lauves)

The Garden at Les Lauves (c.1906) at the Phillips Collection is among the very last of Cézanne's completed canvases — painted at the studio he had built specifically on the northern slope of the Les Lauves hill to give him an elevated view of Mont Sainte-Victoire. The garden immediately surrounding the studio became his subject in the final months, a landscape reduced to immediate proximity and daily familiarity. The 1906 date makes this one of his terminal works — he died in October of that year — and the transparent, barely-begun quality of the handling has been interpreted both as a final aesthetic position and as the work of a man running out of time. The Phillips Collection, which holds multiple key late Cézannes including the famous 1886-87 Mont Sainte-Victoire, situates this garden canvas at the terminus of a collecting vision focused specifically on the late Cézanne and his transformation of French painting.

The late transparency is extreme here — bare canvas is visible throughout, and overlapping strokes of green, yellow, and blue create the garden through accumulated sensation rather than described forms. The painting has the unfinished quality Cézanne himself accepted as integral to his late method. It influenced the Fauves directly.