 | The hill of Valcros: Montbriant and Bellevue
Rose Cézanne, born in 1854, was Cézanne's younger sister by. On February 26th, 1881, she married a lawyer from Aix named Maxime Conil. A few months later, in June, the newlyweds spent a few days to Paris where they visited Cézanne: “Sunday morning, my sister being sick, I was obliged to send them off again for Aix. The first Sunday of the month, I had accompanied them to Versailles, the city of the great king, to see the pools and fountains”. (Letter to Zola, 1881). Maxime Conil owned Montbriant, located west of Aix-en-Provence, on the southern slope of the hill of Valcros. On December 2nd, 1886, after the death of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, Rose Conil, with her share of the inheritance, bought the neighboring country house, Bellevue, including a main residance, various outbuildings, and a dovecote, for the sum of 38,000 francs. Cézanne painted his sister's house at least eight times, in oils and in watercolors.
A few hundred meters from there, he installed his easel under the large pines of Montbriant. The view extended over the valley of the Arc, spanning from the railroad to a backdrop of the Mont Sainte-Victoire. Some elements of the landscape made it possible to triangulate with precision the place where Cézanne painted the two “Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine” above the country house which had belonged to M. de Tournadre, today the Tubet Little Sisters of Father de Foucauld. The small road from Milles and the Aix-Rognac railroad passed below the old country house that was then the property of François Beinet, who was a lawyer and later examining magistrate and president of the civil court of Digne. Joachim Gasquet referred to these two canvases: “Before you, in the Virgilian sun, Sainte-Victoire, immensely tender and blue, the foothills of Montaiguet, the viaduct of the bridge over the Arc, houses, shivering trees, square fields, the countryside of Aix. This is the landscape Cézanne painted. He was at his brother-in-law's. He had set up his easel in the shade of a stand of pines. He had worked there for two months, one canvas in the morning, another in the afternoon”.
That of the morning, “Mont Sainte Victoire With Large Pine” (NR 598 - 1886-87, 59.5 X 72.5 cm), is today kept in Washington D.C., The Philips Collection.
That of the afternoon, “Mont Sainte Victoire With Large Pine” (NR 599 - towards 1887.66 X 90 cm), belongs to the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London.
At the end of 1889, Renoir joined Cézanne in Aix and rented Bellevue from Maxime Conil. The two artists painted, side by side, Sainte-Victoire from the hill of Valcros and the house of Bellevue with its dovecote.
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