Château of Vauvenargues

The château stands on a rocky knoll above a gorge of the river Cose, on ground fortified since the Roman occupation, when Vauvenargues was known as Vallis Veranica; one great room with walls two to three metres thick survives from the medieval castle built over the Roman site. A possession of the Counts of Provence, it passed to the Archbishops of Aix in 1257, and in 1473 to René of Anjou — the "Good King René" — who two years later bequeathed it to his physician, Pierre Robin of Angers. After the lords of Cabanis, Jarente and Séguiran, it came in 1548 to François de Clapiers through his marriage to Margaret of Séguiran, and stayed with the de Clapiers for two and a half centuries.

Henri de Clapiers, a cavalry officer who retired wounded from service in 1643 and later became first consul of Aix, transformed the medieval keep into a gentleman's manor between 1643 and 1667 while keeping the outer defensive walls — the form the château holds today. Louis XV rewarded Joseph de Clapiers with the hereditary title of marquis for his conduct during the Great Plague of Marseille of 1720. Joseph's son Luc de Clapiers, the Enlightenment moralist admired by Voltaire, grew up here — he recalled breaking off from his books as a youth to run circuits of the long terrace until exhaustion calmed him — and died at 32, before his writings found their audience.

The third marquis sold the château in 1790, after the Revolution, to the Isoard family, who rose from humble origins through the friendship of Lucien Bonaparte and installed their own coat of arms; Cardinal Joachim-Jean-Xavier d'Isoard fitted out a small oratory for relics of St Severin given by Pope Pius VII. The château was listed as a monument historique in 1929, but when Simone Marguerite d'Isoard Vauvenargues sold it in 1943 to three Marseille industrialists, they removed all the furniture and much of the interior decoration, including the embossed, gilded Córdoba leather panelling of the library and reception room — some of which survives at the Château of La Barben. From 1947 the emptied house served as a holiday centre for a maritime welfare association.

In September 1958 the art critic Douglas Cooper showed the vacant property to Pablo Picasso, then hunting for somewhere more isolated than his previous home, La Californie in Cannes; Picasso bought it within a week. He told his agent Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler that he had bought the Sainte-Victoire — Cézanne's mountain. Asked which painting, he answered with satisfaction: "La vraie" — the real one.

Picasso moved in during January 1959 and in April brought his personal collection out of Paris bank vaults to hang on the walls — Chardin, Corot, Courbet, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Braque, Miró, Modigliani, and three Cézanne oils with a prized watercolour. He never painted the mountain itself, but the work of his Vauvenargues years — portraits of Jacqueline, bacchanalian linocuts, his reworkings of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe — carries the place's stamp. He moved permanently to Mougins in June 1961, returning from time to time until a serious operation in 1965 ended his visits.

Picasso died at Mougins on 8 April 1973, aged 91. The local authorities would not allow burial there, so Jacqueline chose Vauvenargues, and the funeral cortège arrived to find the château under unseasonable fresh snow. She denied entry to several close friends and to his three estranged children, Maya, Claude and Paloma; the body lay in the vaulted guardroom, the oldest part of the château, for the week it took to dig the grave. He was buried on 16 April beneath a mound of earth on the terrace, and Jacqueline set upon it the monumental Woman with a Vase — a second casting of the 1933 sculpture that had guarded the Spanish Pavilion in Paris in 1937, where Guernica was first shown.

Thirteen years later, with the family divided over the Picasso estate, Jacqueline took her own life and was buried beside him. The château passed to Catherine Hutin, her daughter by her first marriage, still furnished and decorated as Picasso left it. In 2009 it opened for public visits for the first time since 1973, and again in 2010 with an exhibition of Jacqueline's photographs.