The pool at Jas de Bouffan

Jas de Bouffan means something like place of the high winds in the old speech of Provence. It was the country house outside Aix that Cezanne's father, a hatmaker who had turned banker, bought in 1859, and the painter kept coming back to its grounds for about 25 years. This is the estate's pool, painted around 1876, fed by a stone spout carved as a lion's head. Cezanne was working mostly away from Paris in these years, partly by temperament and partly to keep a secret from his controlling father, that he had taken a mistress, Hortense, and had a small son the old man knew nothing about. He painted these same trees and this water over and over as a way of learning to build a picture out of patient blocks of colour. Long after his death the canvas was bought by the Moscow collector Ivan Morozov, and after the Russian Revolution it passed into the Hermitage, where it hangs now.