La mer à l'Estaque (The Sea at l'Estaque)

L'Estaque, an industrial fishing village near Marseille, was a subject Cézanne returned to repeatedly from the 1870s through the 1880s. Its combination of geometric architecture, the blue Mediterranean, and ochre hillsides offered ideal material for his investigations of pictorial structure. The views he painted there directly influenced Braque, who visited the same location in 1908 and produced the proto-Cubist landscapes that launched a new movement His insistence on structure beneath sensation — 'treating nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone' — became the foundation on which modern art was built.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.