Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir

C�zanne rented a small cottage near Bib�mus quarry to the east of Aix to make it easier for him to paint in the open air. He also rented a room in the Château Noir (“black castle”), an estate halfway to the village of Le Tholonet on the way to Mont Sainte-Victoire, where he could store his painting equipment. The Château Noir was in fact a reddish roughcast neo-Gothic building belonging to a coal merchant. This was the place where C�zanne produced many of his late paintings; surrounded by pine forests, with the ochre-coloured stone of Bib�mus quarry nearby and a view of the towering rockface of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

The Mont Sainte-Victoire, a massive limestone ridge around a thousand metres high, fascinated C�zanne all his life and it provided an inexhaustible source of new compositions.