Cezanne's panoramic view of Auvers bears comparison with earlier town-panorama traditions such as Corot's View of Genoa, both setting architectural features against a wider landscape and distant view^[2]. But where Corot organises his composition around one dominant architectural feature, Cezanne spreads colour, tone and texture evenly across the whole canvas, without the light-and-shade modelling that would normally guide a viewer's eye toward a single focal point^[2]. Distance is suggested instead through the progressive diminishing of the architectural forms and a looser, broader execution in the background hills and sky, with duller colouring reserved for those distant areas^[2]. The effect is a light that encompasses the whole scene rather than one that defines or highlights any single part of it^[2].

Cezanne developed his own plein-air style in the early 1870s by working closely alongside Pissarro, adopting unusually bright hues and an unconventional distribution of tonal values in place of his earlier, darker studio manner^[2]. Pissarro had moved to Pontoise in spring 1872 and gathered a circle of painter friends around him there, Cezanne among them, while also working to secure the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874^[3]. Cezanne settled at Auvers itself for a time, felt at home within Pissarro's own family, and was in no hurry to leave the area, later describing Pissarro as a father to him and, more than that, something like a benevolent god^[4]. Pissarro, for his part, recognised Cezanne's talent early and unusually, writing to a colleague that the younger painter's studies were strange but uniquely visualised, and predicting that if Cezanne stayed on at Auvers his work would astonish the very painters who had dismissed him^[4].

At midnight on 31 December 1999, as fireworks marked the turn of the millennium, a small group climbed scaffolding erected around a library extension being built at the Ashmolean Museum, broke a skylight over a gallery, and dropped a smoke bomb inside to obscure the museum's CCTV cameras and security staff^[1]. They descended a rope ladder, cut View of Auvers-sur-Oise from its frame with a scalpel, and left the same way they had come, disappearing into the crowds celebrating outside^[1]. It was the only artwork taken from a room that also displayed paintings by Renoir, Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec, and the only work by Cezanne the Ashmolean owned, valued at the time at around three million pounds^[1]. Investigators believed a sale was unlikely given the publicity surrounding the theft, and suspected instead that it had been taken to order for a private collection; a subsequent tip that placed the painting in a West Midlands pub turned out to be a copy with paint still wet^[1]. The case remains unsolved, and the painting has never been recovered.