Cistern in the Park of Château Noir

Around 1900 Cezanne was working almost daily on the grounds of a place near Aix that locals called the Black Castle. Its first owner had made his money in lampblack, a deep black pigment, and had coated his own walls with it, which was enough to earn him a reputation for dealing in black magic. Cezanne rented a room there and set his easel among the oaks. This is one corner of that park, an old stone cistern half swallowed by trees and rock. In his last years he built such scenes out of separate patches of green and blue-gray, letting stone and leaves lock together so tightly that the eye has to work to tell the water tank from the wood around it.