Viaduct at L'Estaque

Paul Cézanne's many paintings of the French fishing village of L'Estaque, just west of Marseilles, explore the beauty of the Mediterranean landscape. Sometimes he depicted the brilliant blue of the sea, while at other times-as here-he turned his back on it to focus on the harsh, rocky terrain of the landscape.

The immediacy of Viaduct at L'Estaque relates not only to its dense surfaces, built up by the artist with palette knife and brush, but also to the specificity of its location. The railway viaduct, the distinctive evergreen situated on top of the rocky incline at the right, and the two intersecting vertical slopes that suggest the path a train must take through the landscape- all of these are intriguing visual clues that inspired Oberlin College professor of art Ellen Johnson to seek out the site in person. In her memoirs, Johnson described her adventurous quest to determine exactly where and when the painting was made:

Approaching L'Estaque from the north was like driving right through the back of Cézanne's painting and when I saw it from out at sea, that part of the mountain he had painted was right there in every single contour. Even now, after forty years, I still tingle to remember-more than that-to experience once again the shock of joy at that first recognition.

Johnson's sleuthing also connected Oberlin's Cézanne painting with an 1882 canvas by Renoir, Rocky Crags at L'Estaque, (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In January of that year, on his return from Italy, Renoir stopped at L'Estaque, where he ran into his friend Cézanne. As described in letters he wrote to friends in Paris, the two artists went out painting together. Renoir's more distant view shows that they were working near the railway viaduct, thus providing a firm date for the Oberlin picture.

When this intensely compressed landscape, almost square in format, was acquired by the AMAM in 1950, it marked a turning point in the museum's ability to teach Oberlin students in the fields of Post-Impressionism and Cubism. The addition of this single painting served as a key link to help students understand more fully Cézanne's explorations of the tension between ordinary vision and the correspondence of shapes; at the same time, the painting revealed the seminal impact that Cézanne's work had on artists like Picasso and Georges Braque as they pioneered a new kind of pictorial space. The museum already had significant holdings by Picasso, including Glass of Absinthe, a Cubist work of 1911 and Braque's Blue Guitar of 1943.