Description
The Red Rock – a canvas with only three owners
The canvas is upright, which is unusual for a landscape. From the upper right corner a large red-orange rock face comes down, smooth and almost without detail, like a curtain of stone. At the left and below stands dense green growth – pine trunks, branches and low foliage – and between the two only narrow light gaps remain. There is almost no sky. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s work of about 1895, which measures 91 × 66 centimetres in the original and is held by the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris under the number RF 1960-14.
Three owners in a hundred years
The provenance of this canvas is extraordinarily short. The first known owner was the dealer Ambroise Vollard in Paris, who kept it for decades. In 1936 the work went to Madame Jean Walter, who had earlier been Madame Paul Guillaume – the collection in which the canvas now sits is named after both husbands. In 1960 that collection passed to the Musée de l’Orangerie. Three holders, and between the first and the last the work travelled the whole way from a dealer’s shelf into a state museum without ever going through an auction.
One hundred and fifty francs, and Vollard’s own exhibition
In Vollard’s stockbook the canvas carries the number 3865 and the price of 150 francs. In November 1933 Vollard sent it to New York: the Knoedler gallery mounted an exhibition titled Paintings from the Ambroise Vollard Collection, XIX-XX Centuries, in which the work was number 12. The show was therefore a presentation of the dealer’s own holdings rather than a museum selection, and from there it travelled on to Detroit, to the Arts and Crafts Club. In that catalogue it was dated 1897.
An exhibition in aid of breastfeeding
In February and March 1939 the canvas was in Paris at Paul Rosenberg’s, in the exhibition for the centenary of the painter’s birth. Its full title says what it was for: Exposition Cézanne (1839-1906), organisée à l’occasion de son centenaire au profit de l’œuvre de l’allaitement maternel – in aid of the society for maternal breastfeeding. The work was number 32, lent by Vollard, and in that catalogue it was dated 1900. Later it was twice at the Orangerie: in 1966 in the exhibition of the Jean Walter – Paul Guillaume collection as number 15, and in 1974 in the show of Cézanne’s works from the national museums.
The rock as a single surface
The most unusual thing about this canvas is how little is painted on the rock. The red-orange wall is almost one unified plane of colour, without cracks, without shadows and without the details that would give it the structure of stone; only slight shifts of tone and a few vertical strokes are visible. The green beside it, by contrast, is dense and busy, made of dozens of short touches. Because of this the rock does not read as a distant wall but as a surface hanging directly in front of the viewer – and that is exactly what gives the upright format its point. The place the catalogue names is the Bibémus quarry near Aix.
What Vollard entered beside number 3865
The dealer’s description is short and unusually precise: huile; paysage en hauteur à droite grand pan rouge – oil; upright landscape, at the right a large red panel. Beside it stand the measurement 92 × 65 centimetres and the price of 150 francs. Vollard therefore described not the subject but the construction of the work: the format, the side and the plane. The catalogue raisonné likewise gives this work a single heading among the natural motifs – rocks – which for a landscape is very little indeed.
How the collection reached the Orangerie
The Jean Walter – Paul Guillaume collection passed to the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1960, and that year stands in this canvas’s inventory number: RF 1960-14. The museum did not assemble the collection itself; it received it whole, and with it the relations between the works as a private taste had settled them. So the canvas is on view today in a house where it hangs as part of a completed collection rather than as a single purchase.
An upright landscape is a rarity and useful for exactly that reason: it fits narrow walls, between a door and a window or in a hallway, where a horizontal canvas would have no room. We paint it in fifteen sizes, from 40 × 55 to 131 × 180 centimetres, intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher, and how it will look in the chosen frame is shown in advance by our 3D application. From the same country come The Bibémus Quarry and Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus, while a wider view is offered by The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque.
- Subject: The Red Rock, Paul Cézanne, about 1895, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: in 1939 the canvas hung in a Paris centenary exhibition whose proceeds went to a society for maternal breastfeeding
