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Lot Essay
Situated midway between Aix and the outlying village of Le Tholonet to the east, the Château Noir was built in the second half of the nineteenth century, according to the local lore, by a coal merchant who painted it black. Another tradition holds that the first resident was an alchemist who obtained his skills, Faust-like, from a pact with the devil; hence the house was also known as the Château du Diable. By Cézanne's time the building had the familiar ochre color of stone cut from the nearby Bibémus quarry. Cézanne would often travel there from Aix, covering the three-mile journey by cart, particularly after the sale in 1899 of his home and estate, the Jas de Bouffan. Indeed, he even rented a space just by its courtyard to store his materials.
Cézanne had known these special haunts around Aix from childhood. As a younger man he had avidly hiked to his "motifs," but now in his sixties, he normally journeyed by carriage along the route du Tholonet, waiting until after four in the afternoon, when the heat of day had subsided. J.P Rivière and J.F. Schnerb, artists who visited Cézanne in January 1905, wrote that “Cézanne preferred to work during the hours when the low sun cast an especially warm light on objects... 'Day is on the wane,' he would say. You see, he was less interested in painting the violent contrasts that the untamed sun imposes than the delicate transitions which model objects by almost imperceptible degrees. He painted modulated light rather than full sunlight” (quoted in M. Doran, ed., "The Studio of Cezanne," M. Doran, ed., Conversations with Cézanne, Berkeley, 2001, p. 88). Emile Bernard recalled one such outing during a visit to the artist in 1904; “we set out joyously, following a route that became more and more impressive. Pine forests appeared at last, and he made me get out so I could have a better look at the views with him. We explored the area together. In spite of his age, he was very nimble walking among the rocks...When he was in a difficult spot, he got down on all fours and crawled while chatting” (quoted in ibid., p. 71).
Cézanne normally chose to paint the Château Noir and the quarries at Bibémus in oil, a medium of inherently material substance, but the more mysterious and hermetic woodland scenes lent themselves to watercolor, which the artist applied in gossamer, patch-like washes. Theodore Reff has written that “the transparent, liquid color allows him to explore the immaterial and evanescent in nature, the stirring of branches in a breeze...qualities that he rarely tries to capture in the more robust medium [of oil paint] and that we do not normally associate with his art” (Cezanne: The Late Work, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997, p. 29). Through his use of watercolor, Cézanne discovered how to place colors side by side in order to modulate forms and suggest the shifting structure of planar elements in both landscape and still-life, thus heralding his late style of oil painting. His reliance on these reduced means and his mastery at utilizing the simple juxtaposition of classical and baroque contrasts—his use of strictly vertical lines to set off more involuted forms—are plainly in evidence here, and bear witness to these signal developments, which took place within the artist's final decade, from about 1895 to his death in 1906.
Profil de rocher près des grottes au-dessus de Château Noir is the only watercolor of this rock formation in the park nearby the well-known home, which appears in both Dans le parc du Château Noir and Arbres et rochers dans le parc du Château Noir. According to John Rewald, “the brushstrokes sometimes recall the diagonal, square touches Cézanne had once applied in his canvases. Except for the lower right, no pencil seems to have been used” (op. cit., 1983, p. 194).
When the present watercolor was exhibited at Montross Gallery in 1916, the critic of the New York Times wrote, “There is a study of rocks in which a few horizontal and perpendicular and oblique lines are fortified by a few splashes of yellow, and brown and blue, and the rest is white paper—solid white paper—which is cajoled or forced into expressing the weight and volume of rock. Cézanne’s palette in these watercolors is of singular purity, and although he uses thin fluid washes, he entirely avoids edginess. His tints run into one another with lovely gradations. Blue becomes green, yellow becomes orange with flecks of stronger color. There is no attempt at chromatic planes, but the air sweeps over and through the landscape. It bathes the clusters of flowers which are the disembodied spirits of bloom, it sinks into the hollows of bloom, it sinks into the hollows of ravines, it rushes into color and the whole picture is nothing but the union of the two" (op. cit., p. 21). This watercolor was one of thirty included in Cézanne's exhibition at the Montross Gallery. The present work was sold to Lillie P. Bliss, the generous New York patron of the arts, and would later be donated to The Museum of Modern Art.
Cézanne had known these special haunts around Aix from childhood. As a younger man he had avidly hiked to his "motifs," but now in his sixties, he normally journeyed by carriage along the route du Tholonet, waiting until after four in the afternoon, when the heat of day had subsided. J.P Rivière and J.F. Schnerb, artists who visited Cézanne in January 1905, wrote that “Cézanne preferred to work during the hours when the low sun cast an especially warm light on objects... 'Day is on the wane,' he would say. You see, he was less interested in painting the violent contrasts that the untamed sun imposes than the delicate transitions which model objects by almost imperceptible degrees. He painted modulated light rather than full sunlight” (quoted in M. Doran, ed., "The Studio of Cezanne," M. Doran, ed., Conversations with Cézanne, Berkeley, 2001, p. 88). Emile Bernard recalled one such outing during a visit to the artist in 1904; “we set out joyously, following a route that became more and more impressive. Pine forests appeared at last, and he made me get out so I could have a better look at the views with him. We explored the area together. In spite of his age, he was very nimble walking among the rocks...When he was in a difficult spot, he got down on all fours and crawled while chatting” (quoted in ibid., p. 71).
Cézanne normally chose to paint the Château Noir and the quarries at Bibémus in oil, a medium of inherently material substance, but the more mysterious and hermetic woodland scenes lent themselves to watercolor, which the artist applied in gossamer, patch-like washes. Theodore Reff has written that “the transparent, liquid color allows him to explore the immaterial and evanescent in nature, the stirring of branches in a breeze...qualities that he rarely tries to capture in the more robust medium [of oil paint] and that we do not normally associate with his art” (Cezanne: The Late Work, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997, p. 29). Through his use of watercolor, Cézanne discovered how to place colors side by side in order to modulate forms and suggest the shifting structure of planar elements in both landscape and still-life, thus heralding his late style of oil painting. His reliance on these reduced means and his mastery at utilizing the simple juxtaposition of classical and baroque contrasts—his use of strictly vertical lines to set off more involuted forms—are plainly in evidence here, and bear witness to these signal developments, which took place within the artist's final decade, from about 1895 to his death in 1906.
Profil de rocher près des grottes au-dessus de Château Noir is the only watercolor of this rock formation in the park nearby the well-known home, which appears in both Dans le parc du Château Noir and Arbres et rochers dans le parc du Château Noir. According to John Rewald, “the brushstrokes sometimes recall the diagonal, square touches Cézanne had once applied in his canvases. Except for the lower right, no pencil seems to have been used” (op. cit., 1983, p. 194).
When the present watercolor was exhibited at Montross Gallery in 1916, the critic of the New York Times wrote, “There is a study of rocks in which a few horizontal and perpendicular and oblique lines are fortified by a few splashes of yellow, and brown and blue, and the rest is white paper—solid white paper—which is cajoled or forced into expressing the weight and volume of rock. Cézanne’s palette in these watercolors is of singular purity, and although he uses thin fluid washes, he entirely avoids edginess. His tints run into one another with lovely gradations. Blue becomes green, yellow becomes orange with flecks of stronger color. There is no attempt at chromatic planes, but the air sweeps over and through the landscape. It bathes the clusters of flowers which are the disembodied spirits of bloom, it sinks into the hollows of bloom, it sinks into the hollows of ravines, it rushes into color and the whole picture is nothing but the union of the two" (op. cit., p. 21). This watercolor was one of thirty included in Cézanne's exhibition at the Montross Gallery. The present work was sold to Lillie P. Bliss, the generous New York patron of the arts, and would later be donated to The Museum of Modern Art.