The Buffet, Paul Cézanne (1877)
Cézanne spent most of his life in the town where he was born, Aix-en-Provence. The Budapest still-life was made in the coastal town of Estaque near Aix and Marseille, where Cézanne moved several times.
When the picture was painted in the mid-1870s Cézanne was friends with the most important Impressionist painters: Pissarro, Monet and Renoir. At this time, the palette of his earlier so-called Baroque-style paintings gave way to lighter colours, but rather than the Impressionists' method of painting he was preoccupied with capturing what is lasting and permanent.
