While not a change in lighting, his mother’s death, the sale of the Jas de Bouffan, and his subsequent move to the Chateau Noir would catalyze that necessary change in scenery. In contrast to the well-maintained trees and gardens at Jas de Bouffan, Chateau Noir was a comparatively wild estate, which, according to John Rewald, “stood uninhabited most of the year” (Rewald, 85). Rewald, in his biography of the artist, described the location in which Cézanne often painted:
“Here the sky is hidden by the branches and the air is fresh and fragrant, enlivened by the tireless song of the cicadas…After the more or less well kept grounds of the Jas, here Cézanne discovered nature untouched by human hand…[Here] The light filtered gently though the branches of the trees.” (Rewald, 90-93)
What to take away from this passage is the description of the forest canopy, which keeps “the sky…hidden”, adding to the “untouched’ quality of Chateau Noir’s surroundings. The unkempt nature of Chateau Noir’s dense forest created a lighting effect that Cézanne was not exposed to at the more open Jas de Bouffan; instead of having large areas of diffused light exhibited in Chestnut Trees and Farm at the Jas de Bouffan, the forest canopy “filter[ed]” the light into discreet packages of lighted areas on the ground. These discreet packages of light focused attention onto specific areas in the scenery. Cézanne would look at this scene, and see component colors instead of a conglomeration of many different shades. This lighting effect was the key to the blocked color forms that suddenly appear in the late Mount Saint-Victoire series. In Phillip Conisbee’s words, Cézanne describes his own style, the “apparently abstract color, floated so emphatically onto the canvas in broad patches or smaller brushstrokes was considered by the master as the equivalent in paint of the sensations of light and color he experienced in nature” (Conisbee, 288). Conisbee considers that this change to “abstract colors” capturing “sensations of light” was the result of the artist’s failing health, but Cézanne clearly was affected by the lighting of Chateau Noir as he made his paintings there, and that effect carried over into his mountain series.
Although there are few paintings that survive from this time, if we look at the painting, Woods with Millstone (1898-1900), we see a prime example of this lighting phenomenon. Note the darkened stone framed by thin trees and rubble, on the face of this stone is a perfect example of the high contrast lighting effect. The entire stone is shaded except for a single bulge, which becomes severely highlighted in a beam of direct sunlight from the forest canopy. Unlike the melded borders of the Jas de Bouffan grass lines, this light patch has extremely hard edges and nearly forms a square of nearly white paint in an example of color modeling. We can see this same color phenomenon happen again in a patch located directly above the circular millstone in the bottom left hand portion of the painting. In the second case, the color shape formed is has perfectly hardened lines and again nearly forms a perfect rectangle. Here, then, is the event that seems to define the hinge Mount Saint-Victoire Series - the patched lighting of the wild Chateau Noir that concentrated attention on specific colors.
Cézanne, Paul. Chateau Noir, 1900-1904, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington
Cézanne, Paul. Woods with Millstone, 1898-1900, oil on canvas. Collection of Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson, Philadelphia, PA.