Château of Vauvenargues

Built on a site occupied since Roman times, it became a seat of the Counts of Provence in the Middle Ages, passing to the Archbishops of Aix in the thirteenth century.

Nineteenth century additions include a ceramic maiolica profile in the Italian Renaissance style of René of Anjou, one of the former owners, and a small shrine containing the relics of St Severin.

It was acquired in September 1958 by the exiled Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, seeking a more isolated working place than his previous home, "La Californie" in Cannes.

Their tomb is a grassy mound surmounted by La Dame à l'offrande (1933) (English: Woman with a Vase), a monumental sculpture that previously guarded the entrance of the Spanish pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937.

[4][5] Between 1643 and 1667, while preserving the outer defensive walls, the medieval keep was radically transformed into a manor house or gentilhommière by Henri de Clapiers, a cavalry officer, who later in 1674 was appointed first consul of Aix and state prosecutor.

[4] For his exemplary conduct during the Great Plague of Marseille of 1720 which devastated Provence, Joseph de Clapiers was given the hereditary title of Marquis by Louis XV.

He recounted how, while reading the classics as a youth in Vauvenargues, feeling suffocated, he would "leave his books and rush out as if in a rage to run as fast he could several times around the very long terrace... until exhaustion brought an end to the attack.

Despite its listing as a historical monument in 1929, all the furniture and a large part of the interior decoration including the magnificent Provençal embossed polychrome gilded Córdoba leather paneling lining the library and ceremonial reception room, was removed by the buyers.

After passing through a series of other owners, the vacant property was shown in September 1958 to the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso by the collector and art critic Douglas Cooper.

"[13] At La Californie in Cannes, purchased in 1955, the view to the sea had been blocked by the construction of high rise apartments; socially too many demands had made on his time there by journalists and other visitors.

[14] Picasso brought all the bronze sculptures from his garden in La Californie, which he arranged on the terrace in front of the principal façade of the chateau and in the entrance hall.

In the same room are two objects which Picasso often used in his paintings: a mandolin acquired in Arles, which figures in a series of still lifes, and a large black dresser (French: Buffet) in the style of Henri II.

In the nineteenth century room of Cardinal d'Isoard, Picasso installed a medallion cabinet, left to him by his friend Matisse, who used it for storing prints and drawings.

Facing west with three spacious windows, his studio is the largest, grandest and best lit room in the chateau; like the library downstairs, it still has its original highly ornate seventeenth century sculpted plasterwork and mouldings, but all rendered in bright white.

One wall of the adjacent bathroom has a bucolic frieze painted by Picasso into the plaster, a large scale version of his many bacchanalian scenes, with a faun playing on pipes amid greenery.

Among the different themes, he painted various portraits of Jacqueline, jokingly styled Jaqueline de Vauvenargues, often with infant figures — the children they would never have; a series of bacchanalian scenes, many of them in lino cuts, with fauns and centaurs, rekindling themes from an earlier period when he lived with Françoise Gilot in Antibes; and a series of paintings and drawings based on his own reworking of Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Édouard Manet.

Picasso's body lay in a mahogany casket in the vaulted guardroom, the oldest part of the château, during the week it took for a grave to be dug in the shaded terrace in front of the main entrance.

With her principal residence in Paris, she agreed to allow the château to be opened for public visits from May to September in 2009 for the first time since 1973; the village of Vauvenargues had long before that rejected plans to transform it into a museum.