In the park of Château Noir

In his last years Cézanne kept returning to one patch of woodland outside Aix-en-Provence, the grounds of a house called the Château Noir. He had wanted to buy the estate and couldn't, so he rented a room there to store his gear and painted the trees, rocks and undergrowth around it again and again, at times almost every day. This is one of those days, around 1900. There is no story in it and no figure. The subject is simply the tangle of trunks and warm ochre rock, built up in Cézanne's patient patches of green, blue and orange that lock together like masonry. He was in his sixties, painting a few miles from where he was born, and would die in 1906 still working outdoors near Aix. The canvas is now in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.