Paul Cézanne: The Four Seasons from the Jas de Bouffan

Four tall women, each figure filling a panel more than three metres high, once stood together in an alcove of the grand salon at the Jas de Bouffan, the country house outside Aix-en-Provence that Paul Cézanne's father bought in 1859. The Four Seasons (Les Quatre Saisons) personify Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, and they were painted by Cézanne at about twenty, while he was still attending the municipal drawing school in Aix. He worked in oil directly on the plaster of the wall. The paintings were detached long afterwards, mounted on canvas, and have belonged since 1950 to the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. The museum dates them to about 1860, although the chronology is less settled than that “vers 1860” implies.

Paul Cézanne, The Four Seasons (Spring, Summer, Winter, Autumn), c. 1860, oil on plaster from the grand salon of the Jas de Bouffan, Aix-en-Provence, detached and mounted on canvas; Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

The signature is an arresting detail. The Petit Palais records the name “Ingres” at the lower right of both Spring and Summer, and the Musée Granet describes the panels as signed with that name. For Summer, the catalogue raisonné records the inscription in capitals. A young provincial painter, working on the walls of his family's house, signed his first ambitious decoration with the name of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

A Decoration for the Grand Salon at the Jas de Bouffan

When Louis-Auguste Cézanne, a banker in Aix, acquired the estate in 1859, it was largely a working farm of almond, mulberry and olive trees and vines. According to the Musée Granet, the family seems to have used the bastide only in summer during the 1860s and did not settle there permanently until 1870. That seasonal use matters for how the decoration should be imagined: the grand salon belonged to a house occupied during the summer. Between 1859 and 1869 the painter covered its walls with nine paintings on quite unrelated subjects, from landscapes after Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael to later works such as the Game of Hide-and-Seek, after Lancret and the Bather and Rocks now in the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

The Seasons occupied an alcove of the salon. At its centre, according to the Granet account, stood a portrait of Louis-Auguste painted directly on the wall around 1864. If the Seasons do date from about 1860, the portrait would have entered an ensemble that already existed. That is an inference from the two dates, a sequence not explicitly established by those accounts. The Petit Palais adds a biographical point: carrying out the decoration helped persuade Cézanne's father to let his son go to Paris to study art, which he did in 1861. The Granet chronology places that first stay between April and September of that year. Cézanne enrolled at the Académie Suisse, met Camille Pissarro, and returned to Aix discouraged, to drawing classes and a post in his father's bank.

Four Women, Four Seasons: Composition and Iconography

Each panel follows the same scheme. A single female figure, nearly as tall as the field, stands or sits against a low horizon, and the sky occupies most of the upper half. The extreme upright format, roughly three times as high as it is wide, leaves little room for a narrative setting. The seasons are announced by attributes, by costume and by the colour and hour of the sky. Arranged in the order Spring, Summer, Winter, Autumn, the two standing figures frame the two seated ones. How the panels were actually disposed around the father's portrait is recorded in an old photograph of the alcove, reproduced in the catalogue of the 1988 exhibition Cézanne: The Early Years.

Spring: A Figure à l'Antique

Spring is the most classicising of the four, and the museum's indexing describes her as “à l'antique”. A young woman with long reddish-gold hair moves forward barefoot in a long red robe, worn so that her left shoulder and arm remain bare. She raises her right hand to her head, holding the start of a flowering garland that falls diagonally across her body to the hem, with red and pink blooms and pale lilies along its length. Her lowered left hand holds a few small white daisies. Behind her, on a square pedestal at the upper right, a dark urn holds a large spiky plant, which the museum identifies as a succulent. Below it the ground drops away to a dark hillside, and the sky deepens from a pale band at the horizon to an almost nocturnal blue. The figure's elongated proportions and drooping head place her among the classicising personifications of decorative painting, and nothing in her dress belongs to the nineteenth century.

Summer: Harvest on a Brick Wall

Summer changes register at once. She sits on a low brick wall in contemporary rural dress: a white blouse with full sleeves gathered at the elbow, a red neckerchief knotted over the breast, and a wide sky-blue skirt whose folds are picked out with pale highlights. Her right hand rests on a sheaf of wheat laid across her lap, and her left hangs beside her knee. Ivy climbs the wall at the left. At her feet lies a still life of peaches or apricots heaped against dark leaves, a cut watermelon showing its red flesh, and further sheaves on the ground. The Petit Palais indexes the watermelon and the wheat among the panel's subjects, and the catalogue raisonné classifies Summer as a figure composition containing still life. The sky here is pale and warm, but its surface is mottled and uneven, and the same worn character appears in the light foliage behind the wall. The documented signature INGRES occupies the strip of ground at the lower right.

Winter: Night and Fire

In profile, and apparently older than the other women, Winter sits facing right. Wrapped in a grey hood and a heavy brown mantle, she holds her hands towards a small fire at the lower right, where orange flames rise from the ground and release a column of smoke. Above her the panel opens into the most ambitious sky of the series: stars scattered across a dark green-blue field, banks of cumulus cloud with lit edges, a small moon among them, and lower down horizontal streaks of light. In the rising smoke above her head, pale, indistinct shapes merge with the sky. Cold is suggested entirely through the hour, the hood and the gesture towards the flame.

Autumn: The Basket of Fruit

Autumn stands frontally, both arms raised to steady a large footed basket on her head. It is heaped with green and dark grapes, red fruit and vine leaves, and a tendril and a ring handle project at the right. She wears a dark bodice laced across the front with white cord, short puffed sleeves and a long pale skirt that falls in close vertical folds almost to her ankles. Her dark hair is parted in the middle and drawn back. The sky behind her burns orange and pink at the horizon under a band of blue, and a low blue hill closes the view at the left. In pose she answers Spring at the other end of the sequence: two upright figures with raised arms, one bringing flowers and the other bearing fruit.

Signed "Ingres": Signature and Style

The borrowed signature has attracted more comment than any feature of the paintings themselves. Its purpose is still uncertain. Neither the Petit Palais record nor the online catalogue raisonné explains why Cézanne used Ingres's name, and the intention behind it (homage, a private joke for the family, or something between the two) remains a matter of interpretation. What can be said is that the name appears on decorations painted for his father's house, at the very moment when, by the museum's account, those decorations were helping to win his father's consent to a career in painting.

The paintings themselves belong to a phase before the manner usually associated with Cézanne. Contours are firm and continuous, and flesh is modelled smoothly, with little visible brushwork. The faces follow a single type: long ovals, arched brows, heavy-lidded almond eyes and small mouths. The costumes are laid in with broad fields of one colour (the red of Spring, the blue of Summer, the cream of Autumn) and given volume through long, regular highlights. The handling is uneven. The pleats of Autumn's skirt and the garland of Spring are carefully worked, while parts of the Summer background are summary. The four figures do not share a consistent visual world either, since an antique Spring and a hooded Winter stand alongside two young women in modern country dress. That mixture may reflect a young painter combining different repertories within one decorative project. In any case, it separates the Seasons from the later work on the same walls. The Musée Granet locates the emergence of Cézanne's own style in the grand salon, in a forceful palette-knife manner that he adopted in Paris after 1863 and applied to the later panels.

Dating Cézanne's Four Seasons

The dates attached to the cycle vary from one publication to another. The Petit Palais gives “vers 1860”. John Rewald's catalogue raisonné of 1996, followed by the online catalogue raisonné of the Société Paul Cezanne, gives 1860–61. The Bibliothèque nationale de France exhibited Summer in 2002 with the date c. 1860–62, which is also the range sometimes printed with reproductions of the four panels. Georges Rivière, writing in 1923, dated Summer to 1863. The Musée Granet's account of the 2025 exhibition places the Seasons between 1862 and 1864, after an initial phase of landscapes in 1859–61, although the captions in the same publication describe each panel as painted about 1860.

Two pieces of evidence pull in opposite directions. The museum's link between the decoration and Louis-Auguste's permission for the 1861 journey to Paris supports an early date. The discovery in August 2023, during surveys of the bastide, of a previously unknown wall painting in the grand salon, probably a harbour entrance with masts, flags and buildings and authenticated by the Société Paul Cezanne, has reopened the question of the order in which all the panels were painted. Until that order is established, a date around 1860–62 remains a reasonable working range, and none of the narrower proposals can yet be treated as settled.

From the Plaster Wall to the Petit Palais

The catalogue raisonné and the Musée Granet both describe the Four Seasons as wall paintings in oil on plaster, detached and mounted on canvas, while the Petit Palais lists them as oil on canvas. The two descriptions refer to the same objects at different stages of their history. Published measurements differ by a centimetre or so: the Petit Palais gives 315 × 98 cm for Spring (inv. PPP3048) and 314 × 109.5 cm for Summer (inv. PPP3047), and the Musée Granet gives 314 × 105 cm for Autumn and 314 × 104 cm for Winter.

The Jas de Bouffan was sold in September 1899, after the death of the painter's mother. A photograph of about 1900, now in the John Rewald Archive at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, shows the murals still in place in the salon. By April 1918 the four panels had been removed and were shown in Paris at the Galerie Hessel as “Quatre panneaux décoratifs de Cézanne”. Summer's provenance in the catalogue raisonné runs from Louis Granel, the new owner of the Jas de Bouffan, through the dealers Jos. Hessel and Georges Bernheim to Ambroise Vollard, who acquired it on 16 October 1923; his stockbook records it under no. 5509 at 18,750 francs. After Vollard's death the panels passed to his estate, and in 1950 his heirs gave them to the Petit Palais, where the museum record traces the decoration from the salon walls to the Vollard estate. The worn, mottled passages in the sky of Summer may be related to this history of detachment and transfer, although their cause cannot be established from the reproduction alone.

In 2025 the four panels returned to Aix for the exhibition Cezanne au Jas de Bouffan at the Musée Granet, where they were shown in a reconstruction of the grand salon beside other paintings removed from its walls. A publication of 2019 by the Société Paul Cezanne had already proposed digital reconstructions of the room before and after 1867, an attempt to recover the setting for which the Seasons were made.