Description
Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley – the canvas where the catalogue contradicts itself
Two ochre houses with reddish roofs stand in the upper half of the canvas, surrounded by slopes painted in parallel diagonal strokes of green, ochre and blue. Below, a pale road runs the full width. The sky above is grey-blue and takes up only a narrow band. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s work of about 1883, which measures 65 × 81.3 centimetres in the original and is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington under the number 1973.68.1.
A square bracket in the catalogue
For the exhibition held in April and May 1920 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the catalogue raisonné records the work as number 57, under the title The Mountain, and adds that de Zayas lent it. Immediately afterwards, however, a note from the compilers stands in square brackets: this must be incorrect; Fabbri owned through the biennale, which came later. The record is therefore pointing out for itself that two of its own entries do not fit together.
Two exhibitions that overlap
The conflict can be read off the dates. The Venice Biennale, where the canvas hung as number 11 under the title Gardanne, ran from 15 April to 31 October 1920, and Egisto Fabbri lent it. The Philadelphia show ran from 17 April to 9 May 1920 – the same weeks – and there de Zayas is given as the lender. One painting, two cities, the same weeks and two different lenders. Which entry is right the catalogue does not decide, and neither will we; the note stands as it stands.
Eight owners and an auction in 1965
The provenance opens with a question mark beside Ambroise Vollard, then lists Egisto Fabbri in Florence, Paul Rosenberg in Paris and New York from November 1928, Mr and Mrs Marius de Zayas in Stamford, and Virginia Harrison in New York. On 14 October 1965 the canvas was sold at Parke-Bernet in New York as number 92; Paul Mellon and his wife of Upperville, Virginia bought it, and in 1973 it passed to the National Gallery of Art.
Parallel strokes
The catalogue names among the technical headings for this canvas the parallel brush strokes, and that is indeed the first thing one sees. The whole slope – grass, stone, scrub – is built from short diagonal marks running in the same direction at roughly the same angle, regardless of what they represent. The colour does not blend between them; green, ochre and blue lie side by side. The houses by contrast are painted in smooth broad planes, and it is that contrast which lifts them out of the hillside although they stay within the same range of colour.
Un Mas, Gardanne, Les Maisons sur la colline
In January 1910 the canvas was at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris as number 18, under the title Un Mas, a Provençal farmstead, lent by Fabbri. In 1920 it was in Venice as Gardanne, and in February and March 1921 at the Kunsthalle in Basel as number 13, this time as Les Maisons sur la colline, the houses on the hill. Three exhibitions, three titles, and not one of them is the title the work is recorded under today.
What the catalogue counts among the motifs
The headings for this canvas are short and exact: among the locales L’Estaque, among the natural motifs the hills, among the man-made the houses, and among the technical the parallel strokes already mentioned. No river is entered, the road does not appear among the headings, the trees are not listed separately – the record therefore says that only two things count in this landscape, the ground and the buildings, and that everything else is the way they are painted. In the Vollard archives the work is also recorded with a photograph, at number 230.
This is a balanced landscape of middling brightness that takes daylight and large walls well. We paint it in fifteen sizes, from 50 × 40 to 180 × 142 centimetres, intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher, and how it will look on the wall is shown in advance by our 3D application. From the same corner of Provence come The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque, The Village of Gardanne and The Bibémus Quarry.
- Subject: Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley, Paul Cézanne, about 1883, National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: in square brackets the catalogue itself points out that two of its 1920 exhibition entries exclude one another
