Cézanne Summer!
As the Cézanne 2025 festival kicks off in Aix-en-Provence, let's look back on the artist's most favorite place in the world, and the summers he spent roaming its countryside.
The house was built in the fading embers of the ancien régime, under the watchful eye of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Bordered by trees and lush gardens, the structure was in every sense a bastide: a Provençal manor that traded the ostentation of Rococo for something more laid back. Rows of symmetrical windows were adorned with quaint shutters, and the foliage enveloped the house in green. The antithesis of stuffy. This was the countryside—a place to kick off one’s shoes and breathe in the cool, clean air.
Georges Vallon designed the Bastide du Jas de Bouffan in 1750 for a government official named Gaspard Truphème, and it remained in his family for generations. On the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, the bastide endured through revolutions, monarchies, and empires, until Truphème’s descendants decided to sell the estate to a Provençal banker in 1859.
Louis-Auguste Cézanne was a milliner who steadily built a successful business, eventually buying the only bank in Aix. He was a member of the nouveau riche, a growing class of industrialists, entrepreneurs, and bankers born of the Industrial Revolution. Auguste raised his family at 14, rue Mertheron in Aix; with the recent purchase of the country estate, the family could now retreat to the bastide during the summers.
Auguste was a stern and controlling father. The trips to the countryside must have felt like an exhale to his son Paul, who never seemed to measure up.
Paul was an artist, and his muse was the land. Even after leaving home for Paris at twenty-two, he made frequent trips to Aix. His father bought the bastide two years before Paul moved away; the house was a siren song to Paul as he battled bouts of depression in the big city. He complained to Émile Zola, his best friend from childhood: “But all I’ve really done is change places. I’m still depressed. I’ve just left my parents, my friends and some of my routines, that’s all.”1
Longtime readers of the Gazette know the story from here. Cézanne fell into a circle of misfits and bohemians who aimed to push beyond the standards of academic art. These artists were more interested in capturing a fleeting vision, the feeling of sitting on the banks of the Seine on a warm summer day, the hum of a Parisian café, the chestnut trees swaying in the breeze at Osny, the rustle of tulle backstage at the ballet. The Impressionists were nearly broken by the Salon’s rejection of their radical techniques, but instead of buckling under the pressure, they came swinging back again and again, with a series of independent exhibitions and the help of courageous dealers.
Cézanne didn’t have the same stomach for rejection as some of his peers. While Claude Monet pushed to get his work in front of as many people as possible, Mary Cassatt campaigned to have her art (and that of her peers) shown to friendlier audiences overseas, and Camille Pissarro mentored the next generation of Post-Impressionists, Cézanne retreated to his sanctuary in Provence. He was a sensitive, introspective man. Though his art was in the hands of prominent dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel and Julien Tanguy, he took a break from exhibiting from 1877 to 1890, when he was finally convinced to show with Les XX in Brussels alongside artists like Vincent van Gogh.
In the intervening years, Cézanne’s work took on a more geometric style. Inspired by the blues and greens of Provence’s landscape, he used linear swatches of paint to render the textures of trees, grass, and sky. Then, in 1886, he received the news: his father was dead. Bastide du Jas de Bouffan belonged to him.
At the age of 47, Cézanne married his former mistress Marie-Hortense Fiquet; though their relationship had long since disintegrated, Cézanne and Fiquet married to ensure that their son Paul Jr. would be a legal heir. The painter moved permanently back to Aix, and he resided there until his death in 1906 at the age of 67. Seven years before, he sold the Bastide du Jas de Bouffan to an engineer named Louis Granel.
Prior to the mid-1890s, Cézanne lived largely in an obscurity of his own making. After all, he was the one who refused to participate in exhibitions for many years, as he had been so bruised by critics in the past. Then in 1894, Tanguy died, and an auction was held for the paintings still in the dealer’s collection. Among these works were six paintings by Cézanne, which fetched between 45 and 215 francs each.2
The ever-supportive Pissarro, whom Cézanne credited as his teacher, saw an opening for his mentee. He reached out to an up-and-coming dealer named Ambroise Vollard, who was new on the scene and very open to suggestions. Pissarro insisted that Vollard must go to Provence and visit Cézanne.
Vollard was dazzled by Cézanne’s work and acquired dozens of his paintings for an 1895 showcase. The Parisian public still did not understand avant-garde art. But the artists did, and soon, Cézanne’s solitude was gone. Aix witnessed a steady stream of pilgrims: young painters from Paris eager to meet the elusive Cézanne and behold the verdant countryside that so inspired him. By 1899, his prices began picking up.
A summer day with Cézanne meant wandering through the hills and valleys around Aix, taking in the vineyards and olive groves, and most of all, the colors. The light. Cézanne wanted his visitors to understand the importance of time spent outdoors. Even though his style had shifted beyond Impressionism (he is typically categorized as a Post-Impressionist), he never forgot his roots. Pissarro taught his mentees to paint from nature, and now, Cézanne would do the same. As he told Émile Bernard a few years before his death:
Painters must devote themselves entirely to the study of nature and try to produce pictures which are an instruction. Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one’s own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles. Literature expresses itself by abstractions whereas painting, by means of drawing and color, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.3
Shortly before Cézanne’s death, he made Aix’s Musée Granet an offer: he wanted to bequeath one hundred paintings to the museum. Its director, Henri Pontier, turned him down. This grave mistake has left a long shadow: it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Musée Granet would secure a long-term loan from the Musée d’Orsay.
Meanwhile, the descendants of Louis Granel owned the bastide until 1994, when they sold the estate to the city. After years of careful renovations, including the 2023 discovery of a Cézanne mural in the Grand Salon, Bastide du Jas de Bouffan is open again to the public. As I mentioned in last week’s Crossroads Roundup, the city of Aix is hosting a festival throughout the entire summer called Cézanne 2025, with special exhibitions and celebrations. The city’s tourist office even trademarked Cézanne’s name and the phrase “Cézanne chez lui.” Cézanne at home.
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to visit Aix, where they will get a taste of a Cézanne Summer, as the artist’s devotees did over a century ago. But we know that Cézanne cared little for urban crowds. Though the exhibitions in the city will no doubt be spectacular, his spirit truly dwells in the foothills of Sainte-Victoire—a light breeze through the olive trees, and a view of the mountain beyond.
Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (London: Vintage, 2006), 17.
John Rewald, The History of Impressionism: Fourth, Revised Edition (Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 572.
Rewald, History of Impressionism, 578.
Thank you.....
Lucidly written and very informative - thank you!