Winter Warmer

It's a cold day in wintry London, and it's the date on which Paul Cezanne was born, in 1839 - quite sufficient excuse to put up one of his sunny Provencal landscapes. This one is Landscape Near Aix, the Plain of the Arc River, and it hangs in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Cezanne's brilliant brushwork and subtle modulations of colour hold naturalism and abstraction in perfect balance, expressing the essence of a landscape as it becomes present to the eye and the mind. Or, to put it another way - beautiful.