Trees and Houses, Provence

In the summer of 1885 Cezanne, then 46, moved Hortense Fiquet and their 13-year-old son into rented rooms at Gardanne, a hill village south of Aix-en-Provence, and stayed there until the spring. He had kept the two of them hidden for years from his father, a banker in Aix who controlled his allowance and cut it when he found out. That whole arrangement came apart in the months around this picture. In April 1886 he married Hortense in Aix, with his parents standing as witnesses, and that October his father died and left him money enough that selling a canvas was never again necessary. The Oslo catalogue places this stretch of trees and roofs at La Duranne, a locality on the flat ground between Aix and Gardanne.