paintings and watercolours dedicated to mountains and fruits derives both from a deep sense of the disappearance of appearances and from the demise of the visible world." Cézanne's stylistic approaches and beliefs regarding how to paint were analyzed and written about by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty who is primarily known for his association with phenomenology and existentialism. In his 1945 essay entitled "Cézanne's Doubt", Merleau-Ponty discusses how Cézanne gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed colour in an attempt to get a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that an eye observes. He wanted to see and sense the objects he was painting, rather than think about them. Ultimately, he wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style". A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions. Cézanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. The atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was a part of the sensational reality he was painting. Cézanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting." Art market The increase in value of Cézanne's work can be seen from the auction of his painting Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier on 10 May 1999, which sold for $60.5 million at Sotheby's in New York, the fourth-highest price paid for a painting up to that time, and the most expensive still life painting at the time. Cézanne's watercolour Still Life with Green Melon set the record for a work on paper at an auction, when it sold for $25.5 million in 8 May 2007, far above its estimate of $18 million. A preparatory watercolour for The Card Players series previously thought lost for sixty years sold for $19.1 million on 1 May 2012 to an anonymous bidder. One of the five versions of Cézanne's The Card Players was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million ($ million today) and possibly as