View of the Château Noir

Cézanne took part in the first three exhibitions held by the Impressionists, from 1874 to 1877, but broke away from the group in 1879. Three years later, his work was accepted for the official Salon in Paris. The critics were scathing about his style, and in 1885 Cézanne withdrew to Provence. In the following year, he 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. The museum has twenty-five drawings and a painting by Cézanne.