Arbres et maisons au lieu dit La Durane (Trees and Houses)

When the dealer Ambroise Vollard entered this canvas in his stock book, he called it a winter effect. The trees are bare, and through the branches you can make out a few red houses. Cézanne painted it around 1885 or 1886 outside Aix-en-Provence, and he came back to the same motif in two other canvases, now in New York and Oslo. This one then travelled. It belonged to the collector Alfred Gold in Berlin, who lent it for a long stretch to the city's National Gallery, then to the conductor Josef Stransky in New York, and from 1928 to the collector Baron Eduard von der Heydt. Domenica Guillaume, widow of the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, bought it in 1936, and it entered the French national collections in 1963. In 2014 a researcher for the Société Paul Cézanne published a study locating the motif at a spot called La Durane, the name now added to its title.