L’Estaque was his haven, a place of escape and emancipation. He replied: ‘Listen, Monsieur Vollard! During the war, I worked a lot sur le motif at L’Estaque.’ Cézanne was on the run from the authorities, civil and paternal. Long afterwards, the dealer Vollard asked him what he did in the war.

What a turn-up.’įor Cézanne, therefore, L’Estaque was a safe house and sanctuary, doubly so during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. I believe he’s making eyes at a charming little maid we have in Aix mother and I are in L’Estaque. ‘Papa gave me 300 francs this month,’ Cézanne wrote to Zola in September 1878, after a long moment when he feared he might be cut off altogether. She was a moral support - his lifelong quest - and a trusted confidante. Cézanne and his mother were fundamentally in sympathy.

His friends were privy to their existence, and so was his mother. This masterpiece is offered for sale in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale at Christie’s, London on 4 February.

Paul Cézanne, Vue sur L’Estaque et Le Château d’If, 1883-1885. Until well into his forties, Cézanne had a semi-secret family, kept out of sight and hidden from le papa. Hortense was not openly avowed, nor Paul formally legitimized, until 1886, when they eventually married. Cézanne made every effort to conceal them from his father, for fear of paternal disapproval and disinheritance. For a long time these facts were strictly unmentionable. Nor did his significant other, Hortense Fiquet, with whom Cézanne had a son, also christened Paul, in 1872, when he was in his early thirties. Painter, even artist-painter, did not qualify. That meant a respectable profession and a good match. His father, a self-made man, was a domineering character he wanted the best for Cézanne, according to his lights. The family home was fraught with tension. On the outskirts of Marseille, about 18 miles along the coast from the Cézanne family home in Aix-en-Provence, L’Estaque was at once convenient and distant. For many years his mother rented a small house near the top of the town, to use as a summer retreat. What was L’Estaque for Cézanne? First of all, a refuge. Whatever the regrets, and the disappearances, the images that he retained of that place are indelibly imprinted on the map of modern consciousness. Personally and professionally, L’Estaque meant more to him than we realise. For Cézanne, and for those who came after him, it was truly un lieu de mémoire, a memory place, of profound significance. L’Estaque was a place he had known - by heart, as we might say - and mapped for his own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.’ Marcel Proust ‘The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. Acclaimed biographer and author Alex Danchev examines what the town meant to the artist, and how the images he made of it are imprinted on the map of modern consciousness

Cezanne cubism