A pedreira de Bibémus

A few kilometres from his home in Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne found an old sandstone quarry at Bibemus, long abandoned, its cut ochre cliffs left standing in odd blocks among the pines. Around 1895 he began painting there again and again, drawn to the way the stone broke the landscape into flat planes of orange and blue. This is thought to be his first canvas of the site. He builds the rock face out of patched brushstrokes, so the cliff reads almost as much as a wall of colour as a place. The German collector Karl Ernst Osthaus bought it from Cezanne's dealer Ambroise Vollard after visiting the painter in Aix, not long before Cezanne died in 1906.