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Paul Cézanne was “the greatest of us all”, Claude Monet once said. The post-Impressionist painter’s depictions of simple household objects — a fruit bowl, a ginger jar, a water pitcher — elevated the genre of still-life painting, traditionally considered the least important. His building of form through colour and technical rule-breaking led him to the threshold of abstraction and made him a pivotal figure in modern art.
Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, Cézanne rejected his father’s wish that he pursue a legal career and instead studied art in Paris. But he regularly returned to his birthplace and his beloved motifs: the dry, rugged landscape, the fishing village of l’Estaque and the Mont Sainte-Victoire. He painted the mountain unrelentingly, producing 44 oils and 43 watercolours, and revolutionised the notion of perspective along the way.
The sale of the family estate on his mother’s death left Cézanne enough money to buy a plot of land and house some distance from the town centre. Positioned on a hillside at Les Lauves, it was surrounded by low-lying olive and fig trees, with views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire from the upper floor, which he promptly had converted into a studio. The painter was 62 and this would be his last workspace. He came here every day until his death from pneumonia in 1906.
The ochre facade, with its weathered red shutters, is now ringed by thickets and towering trees, through which puddles of light spill and scatter. Cézanne had once remarked how the region’s intense sunlight broke down the forms of his subject matter.
On the ground floor the two living rooms, kitchen and bathroom soon became crowded with painting paraphernalia. Cézanne rarely slept here, preferring to walk back to his apartment in town, which he shared with Marie-Hortense Fiquet, his model and, later, wife and their son Paul.
But his spiritual home was the house. Upstairs in the luminous studio, with its huge north-facing window, his easels, brushes and still-life subjects are as he left them. Many of his late masterpieces were created here, including the 8ft-high Les Grandes Baigneuses (The Bathers).
He was exacting about the space. Instead of the ubiquitous Provençal red terracotta tiles in the rest of the house, Cézanne installed neutral floorboards, and mixed the colour of the blue-grey walls himself to absorb rather than reflect the light. A tall narrow window was slotted into one wall, so that he could manoeuvre large canvases outside to see their colour properly, the staircase being too narrow to bring them downstairs.
Some of the humble objects the artist used in everyday life are recognisable from his paintings. We can imagine him contemplating the wicker chairs, the glazed pottery, quiet pewter teapot and dusty glass bottles.
“We think that a sugar bowl has no countenance, no soul. But it changes every day,” wrote Cézanne to the poet Joachim Gasquet. “ . . . A sugar bowl tells us as much about ourselves and our art as does a Chardin or a Monticelli”.
cezanne-en-provence.com/en
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