Paul Cezanne - L'Estaque with Red Roofs Tile

L'Estaque with Red Roofs (L'Estaque aux toits rouges), painted between 1883 and 1885 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. Terracotta roofs and ochre houses descend towards the broad blue Mediterranean, framed by pine trees and punctuated by a church steeple and an industrial smokestack. Cézanne compresses the village, sea and sky into overlapping planes of colour, allowing the buildings to rise towards the picture surface rather than recede through conventional perspective. The strong contrast between red roofs and blue water became one of the defining motifs of his repeated stays at L'Estaque. With its increasingly geometric houses and simplified construction of the landscape, this painting marks an important stage in Cézanne’s move towards a more structural treatment of nature. The work later belonged for decades to the major Cézanne collector Auguste Pellerin and his family.