Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

This work will be included in the forthcoming online catalogue raisonné Paul Cézanne's watercolors, under the direction of Walter Feilchenfeldt, David Nash and Jayne Warman.

Le manoir du Jas de Bouffan, executed by Cézanne in the early 1870s, depicts his family home in Aix-en-Provence. Bought by his father in 1859 with the proceeds from his successful banking business, the Jas de Bouffan and its thirty-seven acres of land was a favourite motif for Cézanne throughout most of his career. The fluidity of the watercolour medium, together with the felicity with which he handled it, meant that Cézanne often turned to watercolour at this stage of his career as a means of 'laying in' a subject which he later tackled in oil. Although there is a closely related oil of this subject dated by Rewald circa 1877, the present work not only depicts a different season to that of the oil, but also feels in its fully- resolved composition and individual autumnal atmosphere, an independent piece.

According to Rivière (1923, p.201), Cézanne thought so highly of the importance of Le Manoir du Jas de Bouffan that he submitted the work to the 1875 Salon D’Automne, but with their usual intractability as far as Cézanne was concerned, the work was refused. The importance of the work was posthumously confirmed when it was exhibited at the Salon D’Automne in 1907, the year after Cézanne’s death, in his first major retrospective.