Paul Cézanne painted this light-filled landscape late in his life while living in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne became obsessed with capturing the shift in atmospheric conditions between sunrise and early afternoon, waking at dawn to paint and often returning to the same spot many times to capture its variations during different weather. This practice of serial landscape painting was to have far-reaching effects in twentieth-century art. In a letter to his son from 1906, not long before he died, Cézanne stated, “The same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by turning now more to the right, now more to the left.”

Label from Humble and Human: An Exhibition in Honor of Ralph C. Wilson, Jr., February 2–May 26, 2019