Trees and Rocks in the Park of the Château Noir

In January 1935 a Paris art magazine printed an article by the young art historian John Rewald and Léo Marschutz, a German-born painter living in Aix-en-Provence. The two had walked the pine woods above the Château Noir, looking for the exact places where Cézanne had set up his easel some 30 years earlier. This canvas marks one of the spots they found, and Rewald photographed it, a wall of pale rock behind a screen of thin trunks. Cézanne painted it around 1904 and left the house out entirely. What remains is ordinary ground, rocks and trees over a strip of warm earth, built from small patches of green, blue and orange-ochre. The picture was still in his estate when he died in 1906, and his heirs sold it to the Paris dealers Bernheim-Jeune and Ambroise Vollard in February 1907.