The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue

Bellevue was a property south of Aix belonging to Maxime Conil, who had married Cézanne's sister Rose, and Cézanne worked on its land through the late 1880s. A pigeonnier like this one was ordinary farm equipment in Provence, a round stone tower for birds kept for their meat and their manure. Cézanne made two views of it. He stretched the cylinder upward and to the left so that it would hold the picture together, and set it against three bands of colour, the blue sky, the white of the tower and the farm buildings, and the burnt orange of the iron-rich ground. In December 1899 Conil sold the canvas to Ambroise Vollard, the Paris dealer who had given Cézanne his first one-man show four years earlier and was buying up whatever of his work was still in Provence.