Le Golfe de Marseille vu de l'Estaque (The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L'Estaque)

Painted c.1878-1879 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this view of the Gulf of Marseille from the industrial town of L'Estaque is one of Cézanne's defining landscape statements. He worked at L'Estaque repeatedly during the 1870s and 1880s, drawn to the dramatic contrast between the warm ochre rooftops of the town in the foreground and the intense blue of the Mediterranean stretching to the horizon. The high viewpoint and the compression of foreground, middle ground, and sea into stacked parallel bands anticipate the geometric landscape tradition that runs through Braque's early Cubist landscapes — also painted at L'Estaque — to Fernand Léger.

The composition is organised into three bold horizontal bands: warm ochre rooftops and walls, deep blue-green sea, and pale blue sky. Cézanne compresses these zones, eliminating transitional gradations and asserting each band as a distinct colour field. The rooftop geometry — parallelograms of tile and wall — is rendered with short, parallel strokes that prefigure Cubist faceting.