Bibémus Quarry (Carrière de Bibémus)

In 1895, the year the dealer Ambroise Vollard gave Cézanne his first solo show in Paris, the painter was working in an abandoned quarry a few kilometres east of Aix-en-Provence. Bibémus had been cut since Roman times, and its ochre stone went into many of the town's 17th-century buildings, among them the Hôtel de Forbin on the Cours Mirabeau. By Cézanne's day the quarrying had stopped, leaving squared blocks and sheer cut faces among the pines. He rented a cabin nearby so he could leave his easel and paints there between sessions. This tall canvas is one of the pictures that came out of it. In 1897 he gave it to Georges Dumesnil, who had been teaching philosophy at the university faculty in Aix. Dumesnil lent it to a Cézanne exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1910, where it seems to have sold in the first days, and in 1922 the Philadelphia collector Albert Barnes bought it from a Paris dealer.