Aside from being the site of Cézanne’s peculiar development, the Chateau Noir held both a special appeal to the painter as well as a strange history. Cézanne had been renting a room out of the Chateau Noir for several years before he officially moved out of Jas de Bouffan in 1899. He was so taken with the place that he approached the owner in 1899 with an offer to buy the property (Rewald, 241). The proprietor turned him down, but did allow Cézanne to live in a room overlooking a courtyard with a pistachio tree along with the right to paint freely on the grounds.
Beyond Cézanne’s fascination with the estate, Chateau Noir has a unique history of its own. Built by a coal merchant in the late nineteenth century, Chateau Noir immediately garnered a strange reputation and that resulted in its misleading name. Local lore claimed that the owner, so fascinated by the object of his trade, originally painted the entire complex jet black. Thus began its life as the “Black Chateau”. Truthfully, however, the buildings are not painted at all and are, in fact, fabricated out of the orange limestone of the nearby Bibemus Quarry that Cézanne painted so often. Cézanne was actually quite taken with the color of the stone, and in his paintings of the estate, the buildings always exhibit a warm, glowing shade of orange. Considering his love of geology fostered by his friend and scientist, Marion, the beautiful stone used in the building’s construction may have been the source of his desire not only to live at the estate, but to own Chateau Noir. It is also somewhat ironic that Cézanne was fascinated by the color of the stone and the lighting in the woods of an estate long though of as black. The second legend of the Chateau Noir is more bizarre. Some locals believed that the owner was actually something of a crazed alchemist who, as Rewald describes, “had intimate commerce with the devil” (Rewald, 241). As a result of that relationship, the locals often referred to the house as the “Chateau du Diable” or literally, “House of the Devil”. Interestingly, some English to French translations of Vampire mystery novels use the Chateau Noir such as in the case of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston’s The Vault of the Vampire’s French title, Le Vampire du Chateau Noir. It seems that the legend of Chateau Noir’s hidden devil has pervaded France!
Cezanne, Paul. Chateau Noir, 1904-1906, oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York