Dali House

25: Melun
From May 1879 through February 1880 Cézanne alternated his life and work between Paris and Melun. It was before nature, Nicolas Pioch writes, that Cézanne was seized by a sense of the mystery of the world to a depth never expressed by another artist. He saw that nothing exists in isolation: an obvious insight, yet one that only he could make us see. Things have colour and they have weight, and the colour and mass of each affects the weight of the other. It was to understand these rules that Cézanne dedicated his life.

26: Médan
The adopted hometown of Emile Zola drew Cézanne on frequent visits in the early 1880s, and he would often walk here here from his place in Pontoise, bringing along Pissarro, and spent the summer of ‘80 with Zola.

27: Home of Hortense and son Paul
Cézanne’s wife moved here to 9 rue Frederic Mistral (then rue de la Monnaie) when the couple returned from a trip to Switzerland in February 1891 (the artist’s only trip outside France) and Cézanne reduced his support payment to his wife and son. Hortense had fallen out with her in-laws, so Cézanne set them up in this apartment while he resided in the Jas de Bouffan with his mother and sister.

Madame Cézanne with Unbound Hair
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Poor Hortense, Nicolas Pioch writes. She never liked Provence, and she never understood her husband. The feeling was mutual. Cézanne didn’t understand women at all and she was no exception. She didn’t like his pictures much either. She preferred the city lights to the south of France, so they lived apart much of the time. She dutifully posed for her husband during summers in Aix, but these portraits show her with a remote, inscrutable look, with eyes that never meet the viewer’s. She didn’t get much out of the marriage. Paul kept her a secret from the family for years, and because he seldom sold a painting (although he did barter them for art supplies from Père Tanguy, as did van Gogh) and did not get much money from home until his father’s death, money was always tight.

Bend in the Road
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28: The Route de Cézanne
Aix’ official and well-promoted Route de Cézanne is no casual nod to the man. The artist travelled this road, with its sharply contrasting colours, almost every day. At this sharp bend is a clear view of Mount Sainte-Victoire, which he painted so often from different angles, and one of two stone slabs along the route reminding passers-by of who preceded them.
The other, further down the road and bearing his effigy, was erected in 1939 by Le Tholonet mayor Hilaire Houchart to commemorate the centenary of the painter’s birth. The route also passes the Relais Cézanne café, so named because the great man often lunched there, alone or with friends, and even carved a picture on one of the tables. “There will be treasures to take away from this land,” he once wrote to a friend.

29: Le Château Noir
The Black Castle was built in the 18th century by an industrialist from Marseilles who manufactured lampblack paint, derived from soot. He also used it to decorate the interior walls and furniture of the château. As a result he was associated with black magic among the local people, who believed that the château was also home to the devil and called it “Château du Diable”. The rain has long since bleached it in any case.
Cézanne rented rooms here, off a courtyard edged by pistachio trees, to store his materials near the locations he painted between 1888 and 1904. His offer to buy the chateau in 1899 was rejected.
Cézanne was interested in the density of shapes in the local landscape and the rich colours of the sandstone quarries here. The sombre, enclosed spaces of the paintings of the Château Noir and the Bibémus quarry count among his most emotionally profound pictures and are indicative of a decided melancholy that pervades Cézanne’s work in his last decade. By this time, suffering from diabetes, the artist had become obsessed with the reality of his own mortality.

Le Château Noir
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In “Le Château Noir”, Nicolas Pioch writes, Cézanne does not respond to the flickering light as an impressionist might; he draws that flicker from deep within the substance of every structure in the painting. Each form has a true solidity, an absolute of internal power that is never diminished for the sake of another part of the composition.
“He invited me for a stroll at the Château Noir,” his protege Emile Bernard recalled. “One sunny afternoon, he came to pick us up in the car that he had hired for the year so that, if he was tired, he would be able to get to
the motif or to his workshop on the outside of town. We all left very cheerfully, and followed a road which seemed to become more and more admirable. Finally, a pine tree forest appeared in front of us, and he made me get out to take a closer look at the sites, which we explored together. Despite his age, he was extremely agile to be able to clamber across the rocks”.

30: St-Antonin
In the vicinity of St-Antonin, the plains and mountains shimmered in a light in which Cézanne found a synthesis between volume and space. The village itself is overshadowed by the great limestone wall of the mountains range.

Morning in Provence
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In 1988 Vincent Van Gogh, living in Arles in western Provence, wrote of having seen some landscapes by Cézanne. “Involuntarily the Cézannes I saw come back into my memory, because he has so captured the harsh side of Provence.” Van Gogh admires the colourist precision in Cézanne’s canvases and suggests that, if Cézanne’s touch sometimes seems awkward, this is because of the mistral, which makes his canvases shake as he paints on them.

31: The Zola dam
The Zola dam, built by Emile Zola’s father François between 1847 and 1854 to secure a water supply for Aix, was often visited by Cézanne. It was decommissioned in 1980.

32: Three Sautets Bridge
This historic bridge over the Arc River was a popular bathing spot in Cezanne’s day, and he would come here with Zola and paint them, learning how to integrate the nude into landscapes, an effort that culminated in one his best-known masterpieces, “Les Grandes Baigneuses”.
In August 1906 Cézanne wrote to his son: “The car is coming to pick me up and will take me down to the river, to the Pont des Trois Sautets. It is cooler down there, yesterday it was quite blissful. I started on a watercolour like the ones I used to do in Fontainebleau, it seems brighter to me. The main thing is to get things to blend as much as possible.”

Les Grands Baigneuses
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33: Gardanne
Cézanne spent the winter of 1885–86 here with Hortense and their young son Paul. The town’s cascade of cubic houses lent itself to his preoccupation with architectonic forms, which had first emerged in the paintings of L’Estaque. His former residence at 27 cours Forbin, at the foot of the Cativel hill, marks his presence at la colline des frères (the brothers’ hill) with an open-air museum that has the works he painted here reproduced on slabs of enamelled lava.
In Gardanne the artist found a structured motif that enabled him to leave Impressionism behind, and some have suggested that, with the emerging geometry of his canvases and the diminishing contrast, cubism was born in Gardanne.

34: The Societe des Amis des Arts
The society founded in 1894 set up shop in a former garage here at 2 bis, avenue Victor Hugo, the following year, and Cézanne showed paintings here in 1895, 1902 and 1906.

35: Apartment of the artist’s mother
Mrs Cézanne lived here at 30 cours Mirabeau from 1895, and from June to September 1897 Paul dined every evening with his disabled mother, whom always pampered him. He took her on outings in the car, often to enjoy the sunshine at the Jas. Cézanne’s mother died here on October 25, 1897.

The Card Players
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36: Giverny
In 1894 Paul came here specifically to see Monet, who had his famous lily-pond garden here, and also met Rodin. Monet and Cézanne quarrelled, but that didn’t stop Monet from buying one of his paintings.

37: Galerie Vollard
Ambroise Vollard mounted Cézanne’s first solo exhibition in 1895, bringing the artist much critical notice – and much of it bad – but by now he had at last won over the avant-garde. He sent 150 works, too many for poor Vollard to display.

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard
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Even Cézanne’s pictures of people can be regarded as still lifes, Nicolas Pioch writes, because he demanded that his models sit absolutely still. Sitting for him was something of a nightmare. Not only was he foul-tempered, he was an extremely slow painter, probably the reason his subjects always look tired and sombre. Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who arranged Cézanne’s first one-man show a century ago, posed 115 times for a single painting, sitting absolutely still “like an apple” and then Cézanne, dissatisfied, abandoned the picture with only two unpainted spots remaining.
He told Vollard that with luck he would find the correct color and could finish the painting. “The prospect of this made me tremble,” noted Vollard in his biography of the painter. In the artist’s eye, there was no difference between a human sitter and a bowl of fruit, except that the reflection value and the palette were different. In the end, both his subjects and his fruit wilted.

38: Talloires
In 1896 the artist, suffering from diabetes among other ailments, “took the waters” at Vichy and stayed here on Lac d’Annecy, the found lodgings in Montmartre, where he lived and worked alone.

39: The Bibémus quarry
Cézanne began visiting the village of Tholonet after renting a cottage near the Bibémus quarry outside Aix in 1897. The surrounding landscape appeared often in his paintings, especially multiple views of the montagne Ste Victoire. “I go to the country every day,” he wrote to his son. “The motifs are beautiful and so my day is spent more pleasantly here than anywhere else”.

40: Ste Victoire

Montagne Ste Victoire
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The scenery that appears in 44 oil paintings and 43 watercolours by Cézanne is here, each bearing witness to his fondness for its colours and textures. In the early works some elements of scenery are still identifiable: wheat fields, alpine roads, the red roofs of bastides and the electric generating station. In February 1904, Emile Bernard went with Cézanne in Paul’s car.
“It was two kilometers from the studio, at the bottom of Sainte-Victoire, fearless mountain that he never stopped painting in oils and watercolors, that filled him with admiration. Cézanne settled in front of the mountain with his easel, his canvas, his box of paints, his palette and his paintbrushes. He protected himself from the indiscreet glances behind umbrellas.”
Cézanne’s umbrellas failed to protect him adequately from the elements on October 15, 1906, however, when he was caught in a thunderstorm and, attempting to brave the downpour, fainted and lay in the downpour for hours. He was taken to his home on a launderer’s handcart.
Early the next morning he went to the garden of the Lauves’ workshop to continue work on a portrait of Vallier under the lime tree. He returned home in a state of near death, stricken with pleurisy. He died eight days later.

41: Bellevue
Paul’s brother-in-law bought the domaine de Montbriant about 1885, and the following year his sister Rose added the dovecote of Bellevue, which Cézanne depicted while doing a series of “Sainte Victoire au Grand Pin”.

42: Café Oriental
Now the Bistrot Romain, the Café Oriental was patronised by Cézanne in the late 1890s. As might be expected, he favoured its outdoor terrace.

43: Rue de Boulegon
Cézanne moved here, to the second floor of 23 rue Boulegon, in the autumn of 1899, bringing his personal effects and painting materials from the Jas de Bouffan and having a studio built under the eaves. He lived alone with his housekeeper, though Hortense and young Paul, who lived mainly in Paris, gave this as their address in the 1906 census. In 1901 the writer André Gide told Maurice Denis that Cézanne had consecrated a room here to his mother’s memory. His wife, in a fit of jealousy, burned all the trinkets, and on discovering this Cézanne left and spent several days in the countryside.
Ambroise Vollard visited him here in 1902, and Emile Bernard and Charles Camoin in 1904, and it was here, on the night of October 22, 1906, that Cézanne died, though his passing wasn’t formally registered until 7am the next morning. His housekeeper telegraphed Paul in Paris to come to Aix because his father was gravely ill, but both he and his mother arrived too late.

44: The Café Clément
In 1901 Cézanne was a regular at this cafe, on the ground floor of the Gassendi Hotel at 44 Cours Mirabeau, sitting on the terrace and watching the ebb and flow of customers, including “military officers, rich students and the elegant people of the town who weren’t afraid to slum it and be seen at this small establishment”.
But he was still an unknown. Nobody seemed to know him, a friend recalled. The year before, however, Cézanne had participated in the Paris World Exhibition and one of his works was bought by Berlin’s Staatliche Museen, while André Gide purchased a work by Maurice Denis called “Hommage de Cézanne”. Denis talked Cézanne into joining the Salon des Indépendents show in 1902, but his nomination for France’s Légion d’Honneur was spurned.

44: Atelier Cézanne
Paul bought land on the “Chemin des Lauves” overlooking Aix in 1901 to build a studio. This was completed over the course of the next year according to his own plans. The young Emile Bernard became his student here in 1904.
Marcel Provence bought the studio from Cézanne’s son in 1921 to safeguard “a precious heritage, a spiritual treasure attached to these walls, and to this garden”.
His heirs sold it to the Cezanne Memorial Committee in 1954, and it was given to the University of Aix-Marseille and opened to the public. In 1955, Marilyn Monroe wrote in the guest book, “a wonderful visit”. It is now the property of the City of Aix en Provence. On July 5 this year (2006), some 12,000 people are expected to gather at the foot of the mountain for a free concert by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
“The studio is, above all,” says one website guide, “a place of work where many masterpieces were gathered together and where visitors discover, with emotion, the often humble objects which have become precious through their inextricable connection with Cézanne’s work (especially his still lifes). Take time to walk through the shady, silent garden with its fragrant scents, as it was in Cézanne’s day.”

Garden at Les Lauves
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This photo of Cézanne bringing chairs out of his studio for visitors was taken on April 13, 1906, six months before he died.

45: Home of Emile Bernard
The future impressionist master lived at 9 rue de l’Opéra after returning from Egypt in 1904, and visited Cézanne for the first time. He became his student and moved into the ground floor of the Lauves studio.
Cézanne, pictured here in his studio in 1894, had an entire room to himself at the 1904 Salon des Indepéndents show, and also sent works to the Salon de la Libre Esthétique in Brussels. The following year he returned in comparitive triumph to the Salon des Indepéndents as well as the Salon d’Automne. This is when Picasso and Braque first encountered the geometric planes of his landscapes and took the vision back to their own studios. “Cézanne was my sole and unique master … the father of all of us,” Picasso later said. In 1905 as well, after seven years’ toil, Cézanne completed “Les Grandes Baigneuses”.

46: The Saint Saveur Cathedral
The scene of Cézanne’s funeral on October 24, 1906. “On Sundays we used to go to church,” his protege Emile Bernard later recalled.
“He would dress in his best clothes. He would sit on the reserved bench and listen carefully to the service. As soon as he got to the little cloister before the Cathedral, he would be assaulted by beggars … he would prepare his money before leaving his room, and would dish it out in handfuls whilst walking past them. ‘I’m having my share of the Middle Ages,’ he would whisper to me next to the holy-water font.
“In the past I had seen Cézanne here, under the big painting of the Burning Bush, in which Moses resembled him so uncannily.”
saveur

47: St-Pierre Cemetery
“There will be treasures to take away from this land,” Paul Cézanne once wrote to a friend, encapsulating his love of Provence. In truth he never left, He was buried in the Aix cemetery on October 24, 1906.
Cézanne was rejected and ridiculed for almost all of his life, but the year after he died the Salon des Indepéndents showed 66 of his paintings to acclaim, and in 1911 the Louvre bought its first three pieces.
The 1920s saw a surge of interest in and appreciation for the man of Aix, with triumphant shows in Basle, Bernheim-Jeune and New York. For the centenary of his birth in 1939, major exhibitions were staged in London, Paris, Lyons and New York. Today his masterpieces command top dollar at auction houses. His “Curtain, Jug and Fruit Bowl” of 1894 set the record at Sotheby’s in New York in 1999 – $60.5 million.
In 1926, Ambroise Vollard gave the town of Aix a bronze medallion created by the sculptor Richard Guino from the famous drawing of Cézanne by Renoir, who supervised its casting. The medallion is displayed on the fountain.

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There are numerous good websites about Cézanne. The best I’ve found are Ibiblio, with engaging commentary by Nicolas Pioch, which I’ve excerpted for these posts, a wonderful, multilingual dedicated website at Atelier-Cezanne, a thorough biography at the US National Gallery and a guided tour at the Aix tourism site.