Pigeonnier de Bellevue

Bellevue was a manor in the hills west of Aix-en-Provence, beside the estate his brother-in-law had bought in the mid-1880s. Cezanne used it as a base for long walks through the dry Provencal country, and its round stone dovecote turns up in a small group of paintings from around 1890. Here that tower anchors the whole scene. He treats the buildings and the sloping ground as a set of interlocking planes, each block of color set firmly against the next, so an ordinary farm outbuilding takes on the calm and heft of something far grander. The greens and warm ochres are the real colors of that country in high summer, baked and a little dusty. A pigeonnier like this one was a working thing, built to house the birds a household kept for their meat and for the manure that fed the fields.