Description
L’Estaque – red roofs above a blue bay
L’Estaque is a fishing village west of Marseille where Cézanne worked repeatedly and where he found one of his most recognisable subjects: densely packed orange roofs, and behind them a great, almost flat plane of sea. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this Mediterranean light into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
The sea as a wall of colour
The most startling decision on this canvas is the sea: Cézanne painted it not as a depth receding towards the horizon but as an upright blue plane standing behind the roofs like a wall. It was exactly this reversal – depth turned into surface – that came as a revelation to the painters of the next generation.
A place recommended by Zola
Cézanne first stayed at L’Estaque for any length of time at the end of the 1860s, partly to avoid the call-up for the Franco-Prussian War. The village was also well known to his childhood friend, the writer Émile Zola. Over the following two decades Cézanne returned and painted the subject in several versions.
What you see on the canvas
The scene is framed by dark trunks and branches in the foreground, through which the view opens downward onto the village. A factory chimney rises among the roofs – Cézanne did not hide the industrial motif but used it as a vertical. The original is painted in oil on canvas, measures 81 × 65 cm and, by the collection’s record, was made between 1883 and 1885.
The Mediterranean on canvas
The blue plane of the sea is everything in this subject – and that is precisely why we paint it by hand rather than print it. Ten sizes are there to choose from, and larger or non-standard ones we paint to your measurements. The subject also carries a bright, modern interior. How it will look in a frame we show you with a realistic 3D preview. Among our reproductions on canvas you will find Cézanne’s other Mediterranean subjects: Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley, Château Noir and Lake Annecy.
- Subject: L’Estaque, Paul Cézanne, 1883–1885
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: the sea is painted as an upright plane of colour rather than as depth – and that is what thrilled the younger painters
