Description
Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir – the canvas that left for Japan in 1922
At the left and along the bottom the canvas is closed by dark green trees, painted in short dense touches. Among them an ochre building appears with dark window openings: the Château Noir. Behind it lifts the pale blue-grey mass of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and the sky above is blue-green, divided into parallel patches of colour. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s late work of 1904 to 1906, which measures 65.6 × 81 centimetres in the original and is held by the Artizon Museum in Tokyo.
Out of the painter’s estate and eastward
At the painter’s death this canvas was unsold: the first entry in the provenance reads Estate of Paul Cézanne. On 12 February 1907 Ambroise Vollard and the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune took it jointly, and on 12 August of the same year it stayed with Vollard alone. Then comes what sets this canvas apart from most: on 27 March 1922 Zenichiro Hara buys it in Yokohama. After him Shojiro Ishibashi owns it in Tokyo, then the Bridgestone Museum of Art, and since 2020 the Artizon Museum. The work has therefore been in Japan for more than a hundred years.
What the dealer’s book asked
In Vollard’s second stockbook the canvas is entered at number 4454, with a very short description – paysage Ste. Victoire, landscape with the Sainte-Victoire – together with the measurement 65 × 81 centimetres and the price of 6,000 francs. The entry was made after the painter’s death, when the work passed from the estate into the trade; the price therefore does not say what the painter got for it, but what the dealer asked for it, by which time he knew what he was holding.
Château Noir – the house in the title
The catalogue raisonné names the Château Noir among the locales for this canvas, and Mont Sainte-Victoire among the natural motifs. The Château Noir is an estate east of Aix, on the road towards Le Tholonet, and the painter returned to it for years. Among the further titles the catalogue records for this work is Le Château du diable, the devil’s castle – a name that attached to the building in common use. Of the building itself the canvas shows only a yellow-ochre wall with two dark openings; the foliage eats everything else.
A late canvas built out of patches
There is no longer any drawing here to separate one thing from another: trees, roof, rock and sky are made of the same short flat strokes, set one beside the next in blue, green and ochre. That is why foliage and sky seem to run into one another, and why the mountain lifts out more as a lighter surface than as a distant object. The one straight line in the whole canvas is the top edge of the Château Noir’s roof – and that single stroke is what says there is a building among the trees.
An exhibition history that runs through Japan
The list of exhibitions for this work is unusual for where it takes place. In 1947 it was at the National Museum in Tokyo, in 1951 at the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura in Cézanne and Renoir as number 9, in 1956 at the opening exhibition of the Ishibashi Museum in Kurume as number 10, and in 1959 in Osaka as number 23. In 1962 it travelled to Paris, to the Musée national d’art moderne, for the exhibition of French painting from the Ishibashi collection of Tokyo, as number 9 – a French work returning to France as part of a Japanese collection. In 1967 it was in Tokyo again, and in 1974 in the large Cézanne exhibition as number 59, from where it travelled to Kyoto and Fukuoka.
Bridgestone, and the renaming of 2020
The museum that holds the canvas was not always called this. In the provenance there follow one another Shojiro Ishibashi, then the Bridgestone Museum of Art in Tokyo, and finally the Artizon Museum, which took the name in 2020. That is why the same work stands under Bridgestone in the older literature and under Artizon in the recent: the same collection and the same canvas, under two names. From the same Tokyo house come Bowl and Milk Jug and Self-Portrait with a Soft Hat.
In colour this is one of the bluest canvases of the group, and for that reason it works in a bright room that leaves it a quiet wall. We offer fifteen sizes, from 50 × 40 to 180 × 143 centimetres; anything in between we stretch to measure, and how it stands on the wall is shown in advance by our 3D application. The same mountain from the other side appears in Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus.
- Subject: Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir, Paul Cézanne, 1904-1906, Artizon Museum, Tokyo
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: out of the painter’s estate the canvas left for Yokohama in 1922 and has been in Japan for over a hundred years
