Interpretive Resource

Between 1876 and 1885, Paul Cézanne made several visits to the seaside town of L’Estaque, in the south of France, producing a dozen canvases of the setting incorporating views of the Mediterranean. As a group, these works chart his gradual jettisoning of Impressionism, with its dissolution of form and local color, in search of greater solidity and structural integrity.

The Art Institute’s Bay of Marseilles, Seen from L’Estaque, the largest and probably the culminating canvas of the series, is built around calculated formal contrasts. The viewer looks down on the town from an adjacent hill, which affords an unobstructed view of water, distant hills, and sky. The composition is anchored by the buildings arrayed across its bottom register. Many of the rooflines are horizontal, resonating with the bay’s opposite shore, while chimneys and a large central building surge upward, their verticality countered by an implied diagonal linking a puff of smoke with a distant jetty. The more organic contours of the treetops, near shoreline, and mountain range soften this geometric compositional armature. Natural and man-made forms alike seem timeworn, and they do not so much interlock with one another as engage in a peaceable dialogue.

The whole surface is alive, Cézanne being ever wary of schematic description and alert to felicitous effects of rhythm and handling. The varied tans, ochers, and oranges in the foreground deftly evoke sun-baked surfaces. The water is a richly modulated Weld of blues and greens; the same pigments are repeated in the hills, where the artist applied them more lightly and complemented them with enlivening touches of mauve, yellow, gray, and brown. Capped by a loosely scumbled sky, The Bay of Marseilles has a calm majesty suggestive of dry, Mediterranean days.