Cézanne painted numerous variants of this subject, beginning in the summer of 1876. At that time he wrote to Camille Pissarro "I must tell you that your letter surprised me at Estaque on the sea shore... I have started two little motifs with a view of the sea; they are for Monsieur Chocquet who spoke to me about them. It is like a playing card red roofs near the blue sea... The sun is so terrific here that it seems to me as if the objects were silhou- etted not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown, and violet. I may be mistaken, but this seems to me to be the opposite of modeling...' (quoted in Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post- Impressionism 1874-1904, Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, 1966, p. 87). Cézanne's allusion to the design of a playing card and the visual effect characterized as "the absence of modeling" signal an interest in flatness and shallow picture space. As in Monet's Terrace at Sainte-Adresse and Boulevard des Capucines, Paris , in The Bay of Marseilles Seen from l'Estaque Cézanne looks down into and across the scene, permitting a high horizon and a tilting of the ground plane toward the surface of the painting, thereby compressing the picture space Éhe represents objects in space so as to reduce the pull of perspective to the horizon; the distant world is brought closer to the eye, but the things nearest to us in the landscape are rendered with few details there is little difference between the texture of near and far objects, as if all were beheld from the same distance. Cézanne's vision is of a world more stable and object filled and more accessible to pro- longed meditation than the Impressionist one; but the stability of the whole is the resultant of opposed stable and unstable elements, including the arbitrary tiltings of vertical objects which involve us more deeply in his striving for equilibrium" (Meyer Schapiro, Cézanne, New York, 1965, p. 19).

As in the Metropolitan Museum's Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory, about 1891, there is a dominant compositional sub- structure common to much of Cézanne's work and defined by Shapiro as "parallel lines, connectives, contacts, and breaks which help us to unite in a common pattern elements that represent things lying on the different planes in depth". The internal structure that Shapiro describes is the result of the joining of aesthetic decisions with the artist's vision of the natural world. Its purpose, however, is related to the complex problem of réalisation discussed by Badt : "For what Cézanne aimed to do was to state a truth about that world which lies always around man, and not just about his own subjective feelings or experiences. Let me stress once more that this did not mean that he had to add to his conception as a whole by painting in details as true to nature as possible or reproducing objects exactly as they strike the eye of the ordinary person looking at them in the everyday world. 'Realization' did not depend on precise reproduction of things but on bringing out their significance. This Cézanne could do only if he made the objects which he was depicting stand out from the outlines which indicated their mere presence and develop into manifestations of functional existence within the picture which he had previously established as a whole" (Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965, p. 214). In The Bay of Marseilles Seen from l'Estaque nothing has been left to chance. Cézanne has moved beyond the Impressionist record and/or examination of the visible world into the less lyrical realm of order and structure. He blurs the distinctions between the visible, given world and a cogent, meaningful response to it. Little, if anything, in the Metropolitan's view of the Bay of Marseilles relates on a one-to-one basis with reality : "Photographs of the sites he painted show how firmly he was attached to his subject; whatever liberties he took with details, the broad aspect of any of his landscapes is clearly an image of the place he painted and preserves its indefinable spirit. But the visible world is not simply represented on Cézanne's canvas. It is recreated through strokes of color among which are many that we cannot identify with an object and yet are necessary for the harmony of the whole... the self is always present, poised between sensing and knowing, or between its perceptions and a practical ordering activity, mastering its inner world by mastering something beyond itself"

Pictures like the Metropolitan's Madame Cézanne in the Conser- vatory and The Bay of Marseilles Seen from l'Estaque reach beyond Impressionism, but they are impossible without it. From the early sixties Impressionism, or at least what would become Impres- sionism, posed aesthetic questions about the processes of art. It was probably inevitable that at least one Impressionist artist discovered and pursued ideas of greater complexity than the formal problems related to color-charged atmosphere. In the mid- eighties when the Metropolitan's view from l'Estaque was painted, Cézanne had greatly reduced his palette and had already begun to concentrate on the pictorial ideas of aesthetic order that pro- vided the transition to Cubism.

Two paintings close in composition to this one are in the Art Institute of Chicago (Venturi 1936, no. 493; Rewald 1996, no. 626) and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (V428, R390). There is a watercolor depicting the same rooftops seen in the lower right of The Met's picture (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; V916, Rewald 1983, no. 116) and a pencil drawing (Chappuis 1973, no. 338; formerly collection Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Block, Chicago), which includes a study of the same range of hills seen across the water. Rewald (1996) identifies three other related drawings (Chappuis nos. 814–16).

Provenance

[Ambroise Vollard, Paris, until 1901; not in stock book; one of seven Cézannes sold and then shipped on June 5 to Havemeyer]; Mr. and Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, New York (1901–his d. 1907); Mrs. H. O. (Louisine W.) Havemeyer, New York (1907–d. 1929; cat., 1931, pp. 56–57, ill., as "Landscape-L'Estaque")