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Cézanne rented a small cottage near Bibémus quarry to the east of Aix to make it easier for him to paint in the open air. He also rented a room in the Château Noir ("black castle"), an estate halfway to the village of Le Tholonet on the way to Mont Sainte-Victoire, where he could store his painting equipment. The Château Noir was in fact a reddish roughcast neo-Gothic building belonging to a coal merchant. This was the place where Cézanne produced many of his late paintings; surrounded by pine forests, with the ochre-coloured stone of Bibémus quarry nearby and a view of the towering rockface of Mont Sainte-Victoire.
The Mont Sainte-Victoire, a massive limestone ridge around a thousand metres high, fascinated Cézanne all his life and it provided an inexhaustible source of new compositions.
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