Les Quatre Saisons : L'Automne

In 1859 Cezanne's father, a hat dealer who had become a banker, bought a run-down manor house outside Aix-en-Provence called the Jas de Bouffan. His son, then a law student in Aix to keep the peace at home, was given the walls of the main drawing room to decorate. What he put there were four tall panels of the seasons, this one being autumn, each of them over three metres high and painted in a deliberately stiff, old-fashioned manner. Then he signed them Ingres, after the most admired academic painter in France, whose work he had no time for. Nobody has settled what he meant by it. The panels were cut off the wall in 1912, long after the family had sold the house, and all four are now in Paris at the Petit Palais.