[1] It is believed to have been painted in 1879–80, several years after Cézanne's residence in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village northwest of Paris.

[2] Shortly after midnight on New Year's Day 2000, guards at the Ashmolean, responding to a fire alarm, discovered the painting was missing.

Police believe the thief or thieves used a smoke bomb and that night's millennium celebrations as a cover for the theft of the museum's only Cézanne and the only painting taken.

Down a green slope from the viewer are a group of houses, white with roofs either blue or orange, again not depicted in detail.

By this time, Cézanne was preparing to leave Paris and return to his native Aix-en-Provence, where he continued painting in this style, including similar landscapes, moving toward Post-Impressionism.

He loaned it to his cousin Paul for a 1921 Berlin exhibit of Cézanne works in private German collections; it was titled Ansicht an Aix.

[1] Bruno's daughter Sophie inherited it after his death in 1941, by which time the family had moved to Oxford following Nazi persecution.

[1] Upon the deaths of her husband Richard Rudolf Walzer in 1975, followed by her own four years later, the estate incurred a large inheritance tax bill.

The painting was accepted by the British government in lieu of inheritance tax to become part of the collection at the Ashmolean, which lists it in its catalogue under the English title A View of buildings in a valley in the Ile-de-France.

Police believe that at that time, someone used the distraction and noise to prevent anyone from noticing[3] that they were climbing scaffolding around an extension to the museum's library that was under construction.

[6] Once they reached the roof, they broke a skylight over the museum's Hindley Smith Gallery and dropped a small smoke bomb in.

Once there they used the fan to blow the smoke around so neither the museum's security guards, should they come into the gallery, nor its CCTV cameras would be able to get a good view of their faces.

When police and firefighters reached the museum at 1:43am, they went into the Smith Gallery and found the smoke had dissipated, with no signs of a fire.

Instead what was left of the smoke bomb was on the floor, and a flashing light on the wall alerted them to the absence of the Cézanne painting next to it.

"[7] Police soon determined that View of Auvers-sur-Oise was the only work taken from a room that also displayed paintings by Renoir, Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec.

They may also have been motivated by the £18.2 million sale at Sotheby's of a Cézanne still life, Bouilloire et fruits, itself recently recovered following a theft in 1978,[8] and hoped to make a similar profit.

Katrina Burrows, editor of the London-based magazine Trace, which covers stolen art, doubted the thieves or anyone working for them would be able to sell the painting, if that was their goal, due to the considerable publicity surrounding the theft.

A pair of 17th-century French bottles were taken in 1996, and the following year three thieves were caught after they broke open a glass display case to take a jewel made for Alfred the Great.

Accordingly they had called in specialists in art theft; customs officers at airports and harbours had been alerted in case anyone tried to take the painting out of Britain, although police believed that it was more likely in the possession of some domestic collector.