Maison Maria with a View of Château Noir

In 1895, the year of this picture, Cézanne was 56 and had spent two decades being ignored. That autumn a young dealer in Paris, Ambroise Vollard, gave him his first one-man show and people started to look. He was not there to see it. He was on the road running east out of Aix-en-Provence towards Le Tholonet, painting a farmhouse known locally as the Maison Maria. Nobody has since worked out who Maria was. Behind it on the right stands the Château Noir, an unfinished 19th-century house built in mock-Gothic style, where he rented a room to keep his canvases and paints. Four years later, after his family sold the estate he had grown up in, he tried to buy the Château Noir outright and was turned down. He went on walking out to its grounds to paint until the year he died.