Pines and Rocks, Fontainebleau

Lillie P. Bliss died in March 1931 and left her modern pictures to the Museum of Modern Art with a condition attached. The museum, then two years old, had to secure an endowment of 600,000 dollars within three years, and it had to do it in the worst of the Depression. The money was found, and in March 1934 some 150 works transferred, this Cezanne among them. Her will also allowed the museum to sell from the bequest to buy other things, and proceeds from Bliss pictures later helped pay for Van Gogh's Starry Night. The painting itself has been harder to place. It was catalogued for years as 1904, made in the rocky country near Aix. The thinness of the paint has since pushed it back to about 1897 and moved the site north, to the woods around Paris, and the museum now prints that location with a question mark after it.