Rochers et branches à Bibémus

Bibémus is an old quarry in the hills east of Aix-en-Provence. Its ochre sandstone went into the houses of the town for centuries, and by the time Cézanne started walking out there the cutting had stopped and pines were growing back into the trenches the quarrymen had left. In the second half of the 1890s he rented a small cabin on the site to store canvases and gear. So the rock he was looking at was a worked surface, squared off by tools and then abandoned long enough for the vegetation to take it back. Scholars have dated this canvas anywhere between about 1895 and 1904. It belonged to Ambroise Vollard, the Paris dealer who gave Cézanne his first one-man show in 1895, and it reached the Petit Palais with Vollard's bequest in 1945.