House and Farm at the Jas de Bouffan

In the spring of 1923 Czechoslovakia was not yet five years old, and its government set aside a special fund to buy French painting for Prague. The purchase had critics at home and went ahead under the patronage of President Masaryk, with art historians choosing the pictures. This canvas was one of the Cézannes the state bought. It shows the Jas de Bouffan, the family's country house outside Aix-en-Provence, painted around 1887, with the tall house on one side and the farm buildings stepping back behind a long wall. The house leans enough that one of its German titles calls it the crooked house. In Prague, where painters and architects had taken up Cubism before the First World War, it has long been prized as a forerunner of that style. In summer 2025 it went back to Aix as the poster image of the city's Cézanne year, for an exhibition at the Musée Granet about the newly restored house.