Description
Jas de Bouffan, The Pond – the garden that made Cézanne a painter
Jas de Bouffan was the Cézanne family estate just outside Aix-en-Provence and the setting the painter portrayed for almost forty years. On this canvas from the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, trees, a stone pillar and an old building are mirrored in the still water of the pond. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this quiet garden scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas in a scale of greens, blues and ochres.
The house a banker bought
The estate was bought in 1859 by the painter’s father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, a successful hatter who became a banker. The name comes from Provençal and is usually explained as “the sheepfold in a windy place”. For the young Paul it was the first real workshop: on the walls of the salon he was allowed to paint straight onto the plaster, and in the park he found his subjects – the chestnut avenue, the pond with its statues, and the view towards Mont Sainte-Victoire. The family sold the estate in 1899, three years after the last canvases made there.
Reflection as a painter’s problem
Cézanne does not paint the surface of water as a mirror. The reflection is built from the same short planes as the trees above it, only somewhat darker and more vertical – which is why the painting reads as two connected halves rather than mirrored ones. Scenes like this show how he used colour to build space instead of to describe a surface.
The first museum of modern art in the world
In 1928 the State Museum of New Western Art opened in Ivan Morozov’s Moscow palace – by the reckoning of historians the first public museum in the world devoted exclusively to modern art, and nine years ahead of New York’s MoMA in its permanent form. It was built out of the nationalised Shchukin and Morozov collections, which included Cézanne’s canvases. In 1948 Stalin declared the museum ideologically unsuitable and closed it; the works were divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, where they have remained ever since.
A garden scene for a quiet corner
In the photographs above you can see our hand-painted reproduction of this painting. The reflection in the water is built from separate strokes and this is not a print: printed it collapses into an even plane, hand-painted it comes alive. Choose among ten sizes or order to your own measurements. The subject rewards a hallway, a working corner or a wall beside plants. We show you the frame with a realistic 3D preview. Among our reproductions on canvas you will find other subjects from this estate: Jas de Bouffan, Mont Sainte-Victoire and The Great Pine.
- Subject: Jas de Bouffan, The Pond, Paul Cézanne, c. 1876, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: as a young man Cézanne was allowed to paint straight onto the plaster of this estate’s salon walls
