Céleyran, vista de los viñedos

Céleyran was his mother's family estate, a wine property near Narbonne in the far south of France, and he had been going there since he was small. He painted this view of its vines on a wooden panel in 1880, the year he turned 16. Two years before, he had broken one thighbone, and the year after that the other. The fractures healed badly and the long convalescences in the country are when he did most of his early painting, horses, dogs and farmland, nothing yet of the Paris he would later be known for. The panel stayed in the family for 42 years. In 1922 his mother, the Comtesse Adèle, gave it along with the rest of what she had kept to the museum that had just opened in his name at Albi, in the old archbishops' palace, and it has been there ever since.