The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque
c. 1885 · Oil on canvas · Art Institute of Chicago
Unframed at this size — framing is available on 24×18.
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About this work
- Artist
- Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
- Year
- c. 1885
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original size
- 80.2 × 100.6 cm
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
The bay of Marseille seen from the fishing village of L'Estaque, with the ochre roofs and chimneys of the town in the foreground, a flat expanse of deep blue water, the mountains across the bay and a pale sky stacked above one another. Cézanne wrote to Pissarro that the view from L'Estaque was like a playing card, all simple shapes and colours, and he returned to it more than a dozen times in the 1880s; this canvas dates from about 1885. Where the Impressionists chased changing light, he looked for structure, dividing the scene into four zones and building each with blocky, parallel strokes so that the village reads as a grid of planes. The forms seem to touch and shift rather than lock, which is why the picture is so often cited as a step toward Cubism. It belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago's Ryerson Collection.
This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.
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About this design
The Madten promise
An exhibition poster
The same artwork as a gallery exhibition poster — title, artist & date typeset beneath the image on a soft ground.



















