Le Château de Médan

In the late 1870s Cézanne went to stay with his oldest friend, the novelist Émile Zola, who had just bought a country house at Médan on the Seine with the money from his hit novel L'Assommoir. The two had grown up together in Aix, though the friendship would later fall apart badly. Cézanne painted the house from across the water, working from Zola's little rowing boat, and laid the whole scene down in firm, block-like strokes that already point to where his painting was going. The first person to own it was the young Gauguin, who bought it before he was famous and held on to it as one of his prized possessions, calling it a picture he would give up only in direst need.