Description: Paul Cézanne spent most of his career painting landscapes, still lifes, and portraits in solitude and relative obscurity in Aix-en-Provence, in the South of France. But in the mid-1890s, Paris dealers, collectors, and a generation of younger painters discovered his work and finally appreciated its brilliant emphasis on pattern and structure. By 1900, when he painted Trees and Rocks, Near the Château Noir, Cézanne had unexpectedly become one of the more influential artists of his age. His austere palette and taut, interlocking brushwork, so evident here, revealed the very bones of painting composition. It also charted a path to Cubist abstraction, which would dominate early twentieth-century art.
Provenance: Museum purchase from Cornelia Ritchie and Ritchie Trust No. 4