|
Paul Cézanne (artist) French, 1839 - 1906 Château Noir, 1900/1904 oil on canvas Overall: 73.7 x 96.6 cm (29 x 38 1/16 in.) framed: 97.8 x 120.3 x 5.7 cm (38 1/2 x 47 3/8 x 2 1/4 in.) Gift of Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer 1958.10.1 |
Object 4 of 6
Cézanne’s paintings after about 1895 are more somber, more mysterious than those of earlier years. His colors deepen, and his brushwork assumes greater expression. Spaces become more enclosed. Compare this landscape with Houses in Provence, executed twenty years earlier. That painting is open, while this one is screened by a web of branches. This place is crabbed and remote—much more difficult and forbidding. Compare the skies, too. This blue is no longer airy, but leaden, darkened with touches of purple and green. Even the pale buildings have been replaced by a deeper ocher.
Late in his life Cézanne was attracted not only to the fundamental order of nature, but its chaos and restlessness as well. The moody loneliness of this place seems matched to his own. He painted Château Noir several times. It was the subject of local legends and had earlier been called Château Diable, “Château of the Devil.” With its Gothic windows and incomplete walls, it has the look of a ruin. Cézanne still painted in the open air, directly in front of his subject, as Pissarro had taught him to do. But this is far from a quick recording of fleeting visual effects. It is a long and intense meditation, an attempt to “realize”—to use Cézanne’s word—his sensation of and in this place. It involves his temperament, his vision, and his mind equally.
| « | back to gallery | » | continue tour |