La Roccia Rossa

In his last years Cezanne kept returning to an abandoned sandstone quarry called Bibemus, in the hills above Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, where he rented a small cabin to store his gear. The place gave him what he wanted: bare geometric blocks of stone he could build a picture out of. Here a great slab of orange rock leans in from the right, so close and heavy it seems about to tip out of the frame, while behind it a screen of trees is set down in short crosshatched strokes with a strip of blue sky between. He worked the Bibemus quarry over and over from about 1895 onward, in the decade before he died in 1906, turning the same warm ochres and cool greens until stone, trees and sky lock together like masonry.