Château Noir

In his last years, back home in the country near Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne kept circling back to one strange building on a wooded slope. The Chateau Noir was almost new, a mock-gothic house someone had put up to look like an ancient ruin, and Cezanne painted it over and over from the trees around it. Here the warm ochre of its wall shows through a screen of green and blue, the whole scene laid in blocky, deliberate strokes that only resolve into a house once you step back. He made this around 1903, three years before he died. Afterwards the canvas went to a fellow painter who prized it, Claude Monet, who kept it hanging in his bedroom at Giverny.