The Garden at Les Lauves (Le Jardin des Lauves)

Painted in 1906 at Les Lauves — the studio property he had built north of Aix in 1902 — this late garden canvas is among the most loosely handled of his final works. The garden at Les Lauves offered him a controlled, observable landscape close to his studio, and he painted it repeatedly in his final years. The 1906 date makes this one of his last completed works, and the transparent, open handling — strokes of pure color over barely tinted canvas — represents his ultimate pictorial statement: a landscape of pure sensation, where experience of color is primary. The Phillips Collection holds several important late Cézannes.

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.