Borgo di Payennet, vicino a Gardanne

Cézanne painted this small hillside village in the mid-1880s, when he had settled for a while at Gardanne, a mining town in the dry hills near his native Aix-en-Provence. The same country, with its blocky houses and the great Mont Sainte-Victoire nearby, would occupy him for years as he built landscapes out of planes of colour. What is unusual is where it ended up. An American collector named Charles Loeser, who lived in Florence, left eight of his Cézannes in 1928 to the President of the United States and every president after him. So this quiet corner of Provence now hangs in the White House in Washington, among the few modern European works the residence owns.