La Montagne Sainte-Victoire et le Château noir

In the autumn of 1904 the Salon d'Automne in Paris hung 31 paintings by Cézanne together in a room of their own, the first time the Paris public had seen him presented on that scale. He was 65 and at home in Aix-en-Provence, walking out most days from his studio on the hill of Les Lauves towards the limestone ridge of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he had by then painted and drawn more than 60 times. The yellow building among the trees is the Château Noir, an unfinished house on the road to Le Tholonet. Cézanne had wanted to buy it in the 1890s and the owner would not sell, so he rented a room in it to keep his painting gear, and it turns up in picture after picture from those years.