Farm in Normandy

Victor Chocquet was a clerk in the Paris customs administration on a small salary who spent it on pictures almost nobody wanted. He bought his first Cézanne in 1875 on Renoir's advice, and defended him out loud at exhibitions where visitors came mainly to laugh. His wife inherited a farm at Hattenville in Normandy, and Cézanne went to stay and painted the orchard there four times. This is one of the four, an ochre house wall standing behind two groups of fruit trees whose crowns lean in toward the middle and nearly close over it. He was a long way north of Provence, working in heavy parallel strokes and a handful of saturated greens. The year is still argued about. The catalogue of his paintings says 1882, the Albertina in Vienna, which owns it now, says around 1885, and Cézanne's son wrote Hattenville 1885 on a photograph of it in the dealer Vollard's files.