Room 44

A old women, her gaze unfocused, clutches a rosary – a string of beads used in prayer – tightly in her hands. According to the writer Joachim Gasquet, the sitter was a former nun who had escaped from a convent, wandering aimlessly until Cezanne took her on as a servant.Gasquet found this painting...

Cezanne spent several months over the summer of 1888 working in and around Chantilly, some 24 miles north of Paris. This is one of three similar oil paintings of the park surrounding the chateau that he produced during his stay. The symmetry and spatial depth of this view may have appealed to him...

The wall of angular, jutting rock formations in this painting may represent a quarry, with the cuttings revealing geological strata. While the hillside is somewhere in Cezanne’s native Provence, the specific location has not been conclusively identified.Stylistically, the painting relates to scen...

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Cezanne painted numerous views of the Bibémus Quarry. Situated not far from Aix-en-Provence, the site was renowned since Antiquity for its yellow-ochre limestone. But while the artist was mesmerised by the quarry’s chromatic qualities, he also had personal and intell...

This painting is of a summer landscape in Cezanne’s native Provence in the south of France. Like the Impressionists, Cezanne was interested in depicting the landscape primarily using touches of colour. Although this painting shows Cezanne’s debt to Impressionism, his method is more controlled. Fo...

Paul Cezanne was about 40 years old when he painted this self portrait in Paris around 1880–1. He was now middle-aged with a family to support, and the intensity of his earlier self portraits has here given way to a more distant and reflective presence. Although relatively small, the portrait has...

The Château Noir was a rambling house situated in extensive grounds near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Surrounded by wild vegetation, the run-down, isolated chateau offered Cezanne many subjects, and it became one of his favourite locations. He rented a small room in the house from 1897...

During the 1860s Cezanne divided his time between his family home in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, where this picture was probably painted. It evokes the privation of his Bohemian existence in the capital. Cezanne has rearranged the objects in his studio, and we see them from a high viewpoint, as th...

This painting shows Lake Keitele in central Finland. The zigzag pattern on the water’s surface is a natural occurrence caused by the interaction of the wind with the lake’s currents, but it is also intended to evoke the wake created by Väinämöinen, the poet-hero of the Finnish saga Kalevala, as h...

A native of Berne, Switzerland, Ferdinand Hodler spent much of 1902 in the Oberland painting mountainous landscapes. This work shows the Kien Valley looking towards the Bluemlisalp, a massif at the far end of the valley. During his artistic retreats in the Alps – not so different, in spirit, from...

This is one of 14 views of the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris that Camille Pissarro painted in 1897. These include the boulevard seen in snow, rain, fog, mist and sunlight, and in the morning, afternoon, at sunset and at night. The picture is the only example of a night painting by Pissarro.Pissar...

This wooded hillside, called the Côte des Bœufs, was close to Pissarro’s home in the hamlet of L’Hermitage, near the market town of Pontoise, where he lived for most of the time between 1866 and 1883.Although Pissarro was a leading Impressionist, this painting signals his move away from the fleet...