2000 francs: that’s what Cézanne spent in 1901 to acquire an old farm and 7000 m2 of land in the commune of Aix en Provence. Situated on the Lauves hill, planted with olive and fig trees, the Verdon canal running alongside it, the land offers a unique panorama of the Sainte Victoire mountain. Cézanne ordered, according to his own plans, the construction of a studio. In September 1902, after ten months of work, he moved in and brought with him all his dearest possessions.

Set behind a wooden gate, in a garden "whose slope loses itself in a stream", the residence is a Provençal country house that the sun seems to have baked.  On the ground floor, there are two lounges, a lavatory, a kitchen and a small pantry. Upstairs is the studio itself, lit from the south by two big windows and from the north by a glass roof. Here he would work every day during the last four years of his life.

Each day, in any weather, he left his apartment on the Rue Boulegon, which he shared with his wife, Hortense. From six in the morning until five in the afternoon, he worked in his "big studio in the country". "I’m better here than in the city," he wrote to his art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1903. "In every corner, the canvases pile up, still on their stretchers or rolled up. (...) His studio was a big mess," noted the writers Rivière and Schnerb, entertained by Cézanne in 1905. The studio in Lauves saw the painter’s last works come into the world: the Grandes Baigneuses, the portrait of the gardener Vallier, views of the garden, still lifes...