Aix-en-Provence:In Search of Cezanne

Aix-en-Provence: In Search of Cezanne.

Guest Article Posted 24 July 2006 by Bob Bruno

Few painters are so strongly associated with a single town as Cezanne is with Aix-en-Provence. Cezanne was a painter with an international reputation who rarely left his home town.

Not surprisingly, the town has been quick to profit from Cezanne’s worldwide appeal, and is eager to accommodate anyone who wishes to follow the footsteps of the great man, and consider his work in the context of the surroundings which inspired it.

The Aix tourist office recommends a guided walk which will take you from Cezanne’s birthplace in the rue de l’Opéra to his final home at 23, rue Boulegeon.

You can still see the sign advertising the business which belonged to the painter's father on the façade of 55, Cours Mirabeau. Louis-Auguste Cézanne started out as a hatter, but became so successful in this trade that he started making loans to his fellow tradesman, and finally established himself as one of the town’s leading bankers. When the owner of a stylish uptown villa couldn’t pay his debt, Cézanne’s father seized his home: a delightful residence formerly known as la Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, now the Musée Granet, which stands in the place de Saint-Jean de Malta, adjacent to a fortified Gothic church.

© Sean Nel - FOTOLIA

In the neighbouring café "Les Deux Garcons" Cezanne and his fellow artists regularly held court. The café has barely changed since the days when Cezanne violently argued with the town’s other famous son, Emile Zola, the novelist who claimed that art should reflect real life and who disliked Cezanne’s geometric, abstract style.

Zola’s wasn’t alone in his opinion. The Paris Salon rejected Cezanne’s pictures every year from 1864 to 1869. And his father, the hatter turned banker, was perplexed by his son’s choice of career, attempting to force him into the law before finally giving in and setting him to work on a frieze for the family home, which has been preserved at the Musée Granet. Perhaps Cezanne’s father wouldn’t have despaired quite so much had he known that in 1999 his son’s painting: Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier would sell for $60.5 million. Still money isn’t much good unless you can earn it in your own lifetime.

A little further on from the Musée Granet, you’ll find the exquisite place des Quatre-Dauphins whose stylish Italian baroque fountain takes centre-stage, and the former palais de Malte where, despite his father’s objections, the young Cezanne studied drawing.

After his father’s death, Cezanne sold the family residence and set about building the studio of his dreams, amongst the olive trees, on the rue Boulegeon. The Atelier des Lauves is located on the upper edges of a sloping plain which descends to the River Arc. Modern development has long-since masked the superb views the studio once commanded of Aix-en-Provence. But thanks to Cezanne’s American disciples, who bought the studio and presented it to the town, the interior has remained exactly as it was when the artist died. Nothing was moved after Cezanne’s death and it is rather eerie to see the artists’ brushes, paints, shirt and coat exactly as he left them.

In this anniversary year of his death, the town has hired a landscape artist to locate the sites from which Cezanne painted some of his best known works. It now appears that many of his famous views of the Sainte Victoire Mountain, which is visible about 30 miles to the east of Aix, were painted from a cottage adjacent to the Atelier des Lauves. Cezanne collapsed nearby while painting there in autumn, 1906. One week later he died of pneumonia.