‘Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan’ at the Musée Granet Brings the Artist Home to Aix

To paint a landscape is nearly impossible. In any vista, the accumulation of life is manifold and growing. To paint a tree is to fix a being that is in motion, changing with the light and the wind riffling through the branches, moment by moment. The painter has to stop all of that, translating this vivacity onto a flat canvas, presenting as fact the fiction that the natural world holds still even for an instant.

Bonnard painted landscapes indoors, Matisse through windows and Picasso rarely attempted them. Van Gogh went outside to paint in the fields, trying to capture the changing light and vibrations of color as if he were hearing the light’s waves as sound. Cézanne said, “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.” Indeed, his landscapes don’t look like observations, like the Hudson River School painters who endeavored to capture the epic quality of mountains and sky. Indeed not; Cézanne paints close in, as if he were jumping into the quarry or apples, swallowing their essence and resurfacing as that thing. No wonder he was considered antisocial.

Emile Bernard, his childhood friend and fellow painter, said that Cézanne “had no conception of beauty.” How could he if he was in each case the thing he was painting, not outside looking in but imbibing from within? The Mont Saint-Victoires that he paints over and over is never realistic, even though they are recognizable as that mountain. They are clusters of received impressions that came to him with weight and import. He received the world through painting, drawing every day and painting en plein air the day he died. In his life, he made some 900 paintings.

Monet felt Cézanne was “the greatest of us all.” Matisse called him “a kind of dear God of Painting.” Picasso said Cézanne was “My one and only master… The father of us all… mother hovering over.” He influenced the Cubists—Picasso bought the painting The Sea at L’Estaque with its Cubist-looking houses. Cézanne was Morandi’s idol, and Hemingway said that Cézanne’s landscapes greatly influenced his work. Marsden Hartley said, “Will anyone ever appear again with so peculiar and almost unbelievable a faculty for dividing color and sensations and making logical realizations of them?” Contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall wrote, “No one looks to nature or the self anymore as the source of revelation in art, as Cézanne did;” and Luc Tuymans, after his first encounter with a Cézanne, said, “I was immediately struck with an utter sense of austerity and unease, as if something was superimposed over the image to suppress and contain it. The work portrayed a lugubrious, dull sense of euphoria pursuing perfection within a narrow range. In other words, the encounter was a violent one.”

Painters show us through their paintings how the world touches them, and Cézanne’s unease within himself and with the world is clear. He was not a happy man, pushing to find “the harmony” in nature that he didn’t experience in life. He never received recognition from critics. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s famous essay, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” he wrote: “…nine days out of ten, all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration.”

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and died there in 1906, aged 67. In Aix, the large and grey wall of the Sainte-Victoire mountain framed his world, which he painted countless times, leaving behind thirty oils and watercolors of the mountain. The stately cypress trees, which the Etruscans brought to Italy 2,000 years ago, still line the roads, contrasting with the orange rooftops of stone houses. Living in Paris, Cézanne always returned to his beloved hometown and Provence’s famous light.

This year, the city of Aix is honoring Le Papa, the Master of Aix, with a series of events, exhibitions, restorations and re-openings collectively titled, “Cézanne 2025.” The newly restored country house that the artist’s family owned for 40 years, Jas de Bouffan, is now permanently open to the public, with access to his studio on the second floor. On display at Aix’s Musée Granet, “Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan,” is an exhibition with 130 oils on canvas, watercolors and drawings, on loan from institutions around the world. There are Cézanne’s first geometric landscapes, as well as a dozen newly discovered and restored murals that he painted directly onto the wall when he was in his twenties. Fragments of one mural show an elegant woman carrying fruit and bouquets of flowers. La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1897), once part of a Nazi-era collection, is being shown for the first time. Visitors can also explore the gardens of the estate, the chestnut tree-lined avenue and the adjoining farmhouse. A new public trail leads to the Bibémus quarries that Cézanne often painted, and beyond to the mountain itself. Visitors can explore his very first studio as well as his last, the Atelier des Lauves, also recently restored.

The museum show offers a wonderful array of his oeuvre: Tall Trees at Jas de Bouffan, 1883, The Artist’s Father Reading L’Evenement, 1866, Still Life with Cherries and Peaches, 1885-87, Bather and Rocks, 1867-69. There are photographs of Cézanne in his studio and painting en plein air. But better still is simply walking in the environment that so captivated and obsessed him. (Aix-en-Provence in southern France also inspired Van Gogh and the poets Wallace Stevens, Rilke and William Carlos Williams.) It is not difficult to want to merge with the blinding white sun, ancient houses, tall cypress trees and the famous mountain that backdrops the city.

As French author Jean Giono wrote of that region: “There was so much light that the world was seen as it really is: no longer bare as in the daylight, but rounded out with shadow and the colour of rare quality. It delighted the eye. The aspect of things was no longer cruel, but everything told a story, all spoke softly to the senses.” He could have been describing one of Cézanne’s paintings.

“Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan” is on view at the Musée Granet through October 12, 2025, as part of the “Cézanne 2025” celebrations in Aix-en-Provence, France.

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