Landscape near Aix-en-Provence

In 1878 Cézanne's father opened one of his son's letters and found out that the 39-year-old painter had been keeping a companion and a small boy out of sight for years. He cut the allowance they were living on. That is the situation around this landscape, painted outside Aix about 1879, in the stretch when Cézanne had stopped showing with the Impressionists and was sending work to the Salon every spring and being refused every spring. He was out on the dry ground north and west of the town that he would keep coming back to for the rest of his life. The canvas hangs in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, where it arrived with the Corboud foundation's loan of its 19th-century French collection, and the museum's own label dates it to about 1879 rather than to any single year.