the field. After working for two hours he decided to go home; but on the way he collapsed and lost consciousness. He was taken home by a passing driver of a laundry cart. Due to hypothermia, he contracted severe pneumonia. His old housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore the circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness. The next day, Cézanne went out into the garden to work on his last painting, Portrait of the Gardener Vallier, and wrote an impatient letter to his paint dealer, bemoaning the delay in the delivery of paint, but later on he fainted. Vallier with whom he was working called for help; he was put to bed, and he never left it. His wife Hortense and son Paul received a telegram from the housekeeper, but they were too late. He died a few days later, on 22 October 1906 of pneumonia at the age of 67, and was buried at the Saint-Pierre Cemetery in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Main periods of Cézanne's work Various periods in the work and life of Cézanne have been defined. Dark period, Paris, 1861–1870 Cézanne's early "dark" period was influenced by the works of French Romanticism and early Realism. Models were Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet. His paintings are characterized by a thick application of paint, high-contrast, dark tones with pronounced shadows, the use of pure black and other tones mixed with black, brown, gray and Prussian blue; occasionally a few white dots or green and red brushstrokes are added to brighten up, enlivening the monochrome monotony. The themes of his pictures from this period are portraits of family members or demonic-erotic content, in which his own traumatic experiences are reminiscent.They differ sharply from his earlier watercolours and sketches at the École Spéciale de dessin at Aix-en-Provence in 1859, and their violence of expression is in contrast to his subsequent works. In 1866–67, inspired by the example of Courbet, Cézanne painted a series of paintings with a palette knife. He later called these works, mostly portraits, une couillarde ("a coarse word for ostentatious virility"). Lawrence Gowing has written that Cézanne's palette knife phase "was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment". Among the couillarde paintings are a series of portraits of his uncle Dominique in which Cézanne achieved a