View of the Château Noir, Paul Cézanne

View of the Château Noir, Paul Cézanne (1890)

Paul Cézanne received an inheritance from his father’s estate, which secured his financial independence. In 1897, he bought a small estate to the north of his birthplace Aix-en-Provence, with a house, a studio, and a magnificent view of the countryside. In those lovely surroundings, Cézanne spent his time drawing and painting. The deliberately unpolished style of his many watercolour paintings was something totally new at the time. Many of those works are pencil sketches to which he added a few touches of paint. Cézanne delighted in the countryside around him. He made numerous drawings and paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the distinctive mountain overlooking Aix and its environs. He also depicted picturesque sites like the Château Noir, a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic castle with mock ruins, built on a hilltop near the Bibémus quarry. This is a rough sketch of the castle