Chateau Noir

Château Noir (c.1900), at the National Gallery of Art, depicts the mysterious nineteenth-century building east of Aix-en-Provence that Cézanne rented as a studio space in his final years. The building's dark, romantic character—its unfinished state, its sombre stone, its enclosure by dense Mediterranean woodland—made it a compelling subject that he returned to obsessively between 1895 and 1905. The National Gallery's version is one of several dozen representations of the building from varying angles and distances, each exploring the relationship between the architectural mass and the surrounding vegetation, between the man-made and the natural, in the landscape he had made his own.

The building's irregular dark stone mass is built from Cézanne's characteristic parallel planes of colour—cool greys and warm ochres alternating in modulated passages that create solidity without conventional modelling. The surrounding trees are handled with the directional, overlapping strokes of his late landscape work, their forms both specific and analytically reduced to their essential structure. The composition of building-within-woodland creates a layered spatial structure that his brushwork addresses plane by plane.