Cézanne at the Luxembourg Museum

The Luxembourg Museum occupies the east wing of the Luxembourg Palace and is devoted to temporary exhibitions. It was used to display many of the works from the old masters, which are now in the Louvre. Even the work of the Impressionists were in the Musée du Luxembourg before being transferred to the Musée d'Orsay.

They had a beautiful Cezanne exhibition, "Cezanne et Paris," with about 80 of his paintings. Although Cézanne (1839-1906) was from Aix-en-Provence, and is usually associated with the Provence region, he spent more than half of his time as a painter in Paris and its surroundings—especially Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village outside of Paris where during the 19th century a number of painters lived and worked, including Pissarro and van Gogh.

Cézanne went for the first time to Paris in 1861, encouraged by his childhood friend Emile Zola, who was already living there. Paradoxically, Cézanne did not make Paris the subject of his paintings, as did many of his contemporaries. The exhibition explores the course the painter took in Paris and its region and the motifs and pictorial choices he adopted.

Below is View of Auvers-sur-Oise, which was painted in the early 1870s when Cézanne was staying with his friend Dr. Paul Gachet, a great supporter of the Impressionist movement and  famous for treating van Gogh during his last weeks in Auvers-sur-Oise.