Environs de Gardanne

Cézanne spent the winter of 1885 and most of the following year at Gardanne, a hill town about eight miles from Aix where the work was coal mining, living in rented rooms with Hortense Fiquet and their son. 1886 was the year things settled for him. He married Hortense in the April, nearly 17 years after they met and eight after his father found out she existed, and in October his father died and left him money enough that selling paintings stopped mattering. In May, while he was working on the farmland below the town, the Impressionists opened their eighth and last group show in Paris without him. He had exhibited with them in 1874 and 1877 and then stopped. The picture has stayed in private hands, and last changed owners at auction in New York in 2008.