The landscapes of L’Estaque appear in several paintings by Paul Cézanne. The artist grew up in Aix-en-Provence in France, and his mother owned a summerhouse in L’Estaque, the town where the artist took refuge during the Franco-Prussian War to avoid enlistment and stay close to his girlfriend, Hortense Fiquet (1850-1922), despite his father’s disapproval of the relationship. In the works he produced in L’Estaque, we see the local geography, houses on the hills, and the Bay of Marseille in the background. Southern France is a region marked by its geological heritage; full of old quarries, Paleolithic rocks and pre-historic caves. In his youth, Cézanne used to go for walks with his friends in the quarries of Bibémus and Chateau Noir. As well as the writer Émile Zola (1840-1902), the geologist Antoine-Fortuné Marion (1846-1900) was also part of the group. Cézanne’s sketchbooks from the time when he was painting his first landscapes of L’Estaque contain Marion’s geological schemes. Cézanne typically used short brushstrokes, made in the size of the length of a brush, which became a sort of measurement unit to organize the painting and flatten volumes. With parallel stains, the artist varied inclination and color combinations, as a way of representing nature both atmospherically and formally, composing a pulsating image. Cézanne revisited rocks as a motif at different stages, from the start of the 1860s to the beginning of the 20th century, when the artist arrived at daring and multifaceted compositional experiments that announced the aesthetics of cubism.
— Laura Cosendey, assistent curator, MASP, 2021
By Luciano Migliaccio
Cézanne’s mother owned a house in the village of L’Estaque, located ten kilometers north of Marseilles and approximately thirty kilometers east of Aix-en-Provence. Here Cézanne sought refuge from the war in 1870, staying there several times in the following years, until 1890. The most likely date for the painting is 1882-1985, as Venturi suggested. Camesasca (1989, p. 108) thinks the painting may have been produced in February 1884, when Cézanne was in L’Estaque where he met Monet and Renoir. The same author made a connection between Clis in L’Estaque and a letter in which Cézanne wrote to Zola, in 1883: “I have rented a small house in L’Estaque, right above the railroad station. Rock formations outcrop behind the house and there are pine trees... We have wonderful views here, but this fact in itself does not provide motifs. However, when the sun alights slightly above the ocean, we have a beautiful view of Marseilles and the islands in the background, all in the sunset light, rendering a fine decorative effect”. The experience gathered in L’Estaque seems to have been decisive for the subsequent development of Cézanne’s style characterized by the constructive use of color-light and color-shade relations, and the brushwork that rendered the painting’s visual structure (Schaefer 1984-1985).
— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998
