Gardanne. View of the Claou

Cézanne brought his family to Gardanne, a hill town about 12 kilometres south of Aix, in the summer of 1885, and worked there through the following spring. The Claou is the open ground at the edge of the town on the road to Mimet, with a low stone hut among the pines that the commune bought and restored a century later. Two things happened to him in the months around this picture. In April 1886 he married Hortense Fiquet, the mother of his 14-year-old son, in Aix and in front of his parents, after putting the wedding off for years. In October his father died and left him money enough that he never had to ask for any again. He painted the town itself several times that year, the cubic houses stacked up the slope under the church tower.