Paul Cezanne - Chateau Noir Notebook

Château Noir, painted in Aix-en-Provence in 1905 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. The ochre building rises among trees and rocky ground, its walls and dark openings broken into the same coloured planes that shape the surrounding vegetation. Cézanne compresses depth so that architecture, branches and hillside lock together across the surface of the canvas. The rigid geometry of the orange-yellow building contrasts with the dense greens of the surrounding trees, while repeated patches of colour create a strong surface rhythm. Château Noir was one of the sites he returned to repeatedly in his final years, when buildings and landscape increasingly became part of a single constructed visual structure. The painting later belonged to Pablo Picasso and entered the French national collections through the Picasso Donation in 1978.