Aix-en-Provence is celebrating its most famous son, Paul Cézanne, with a year-long festival, Cézanne 2025.
For far too long, the painter was a prophet without honour in his own land. In 1900, Henri Pontier, director of the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, sniffed: “While I am alive, no Cézanne will be allowed to enter the museum.” Charming. One critic called Cézanne “a madman who paints in delirium tremens.” Another dubbed his canvases “oppressive abominations, which exceed the measure of evil permitted by law.”
REJECTED BY HIS HOMETOWN
During his lifetime, Cézanne was spurned by Aix-en-Provence, then a deeply conservative town. They rejected his radical vision because he wouldn’t follow the rules; his work simply wasn’t classical or polished enough. Defiantly independent, Cézanne refused to bow to convention. To locals, he was a subversive outsider, not “one of us.”
But after titans like Picasso and Matisse loudly championed him, the mood shifted. Today, the city practically sings, “We built this city on Paul Cézanne” (en français, bien sûr).
FROM OUTCAST TO MASTER
In the Provencal city, he has gone from zero to hero, becoming one of the world’s most valuable painters. In 2012, a version of his iconic The Card Players – one of only five in existence – sold to Qatar for a record-breaking $250 million.
This Post-Impressionist master is Aix-en-Provence’s biggest star, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year — and even more in 2025. A century after casting him into the wilderness, the city welcomes him home with Cézanne 2025.
A centrepiece of the festival is Cézanne at the Jas de Bouffan, running 28 June to October at the Musée Granet — the very gallery whose former director vowed never to hang his work. Featuring 130 masterpieces of Cézanne’s beloved family home, the show promises an unprecedented look at the place that shaped him.
As Toulouse-Lautrec is to Paris, Van Gogh to Arles, and Monet to Giverny, Cézanne is forever bound to Aix-en-Provence.
Left: Paul Cézanne, Les Grands Arbres au Jas de Bouffan, c. 1883. Samuel Courtauld Trust, legs. S. Courtauld, 1948. © The Courtauld.
Right: Jas de Bouffan’s manor house (Bastide in French) in Aix-en-Provence, which inspired many of Cézanne’s works. Photo © Michel Fraisset.
THE JAS DE BOUFFAN: CÉZANNE’S ARTISTIC LABORATORY
The painter had a deep emotional connection to the place. It inspired eternal works like his many versions of Mont Sainte-Victoire and The Card Players. For Cezanne, who was born and died there, Aix was his artistic muse.
That bond only deepened when Cézanne moved to Paris in his 20s. From the capital, he wrote: “When I was in Aix, I thought I’d be better off somewhere else. Now I’m here, I miss Aix. When you’re born there, it’s hopeless. Nothing else is good enough.”
On a recent visit to Aix-en-Provence, I begin to grasp the magic that so influenced Cézanne.
His spirit lingers at Jas de Bouffan, the estate that features in the forthcoming exhibition. The Cézanne family home for four decades, its garden still boasts the subtly shaded greenery seen in works like The Alley of Chestnut Trees and The Neighbourhood of Jas de Bouffan.
Surrounded by fifteen hectares of vineyards and orchards, Jas de Bouffan was more than a home – it was Cézanne’s outdoor studio, a crucible for his mastery of colour, structure and perspective. Inside, he painted nine murals in the Grand Salon. Recently, a fragment of a previously unknown fresco depicting a harbour entrance was discovered there. Labourers on the estate posed for his Card Players series, one of which is displayed in the exhibition.
Paul Cézanne, Les Joueurs de cartes, 1893-1896. Musée d’Orsay, legs. I. de Camondo, 1911. © Musée d’Orsay / H. Lewandowski.
THE ENCHANTMENT OF THE BIBÉMUS QUARRIES
As part of our “Cézanne Pilgrimage,” we also visit the nearby Bibémus Quarries – another of his creative sanctuaries. A natural alfresco museum of sculpted boulders, these abandoned sandstone quarries became his outdoor studio from 1890 to 1904. Academic John Rewald called it, “A palace in open-air.”
At this tranquil, bird-filled haven, Cézanne honed his unique structuralist style. He loved the quarries’ contrast of the “hot” red rocks against the “cold” green vegetation. His visionary, almost hallucinatory paintings of this landscape – seen in the Bibémus Quarries cycle – were decades ahead of their time.
MONT SAINTE-VICTOIRE: CÉZANNE’S ENDLESS OBSESSION
We cannot leave Aix without visiting Cézanne’s most famous subject: Mont Sainte-Victoire. The artist – who believed the world could be reduced to cones, spheres, cubes and cylinders – felt he never quite captured the mountain’s essence. Yet his repeated attempts left a priceless legacy.
From the terrace of the Atelier des Lodges restaurant, the view of the mountain is spellbinding. In a single afternoon, Mont Sainte-Victoire shifts from green to metallic grey to brown to black. No wonder Cézanne painted it over 100 times. It was his equivalent of Monet’s waterlilies.
A distant, isolated man, Cézanne was always more passionate about nature than people. A crucifix stands atop the mountain, but he never painted it. He wanted no human presence to intrude on his natural idyll. Nature was his religion — his church not made with hands.
Left: Paul Cézanne, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1897. Bern, Kunstmuseum Bern, Legs. Cornelius Gurlitt, 2014. ©Kunstmuseum, Bern.
Right: Carrières de Bibémus, Aix-en-Provence. Photo © M. Fraisset.
WHY CÉZANNE STILL MOVES US TODAY
Cécile Corellou, our guide, explains why Cézanne’s work still resonates 119 years after his death: “When you enter his world, you feel these deep emotions. You immediately connect. You can even smell the grass in The Blue Landscape. Every time I see it, I cry.”
His geometric simplification and chromatic abstraction shaped modern art movements — Cubism, Fauvism, Abstraction. Rightly, he’s called the “Father of Modern Art.”
As Monet said: “Cézanne, he is the greatest of us all!”
He is.
And it’s all thanks to his timeless muse, Aix-en-Provence.
Cezanne at the Jas De Bouffon
Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence
28th June to 12th October 2025
Further information and tickets, HERE.
Author: James Rampton
Lead image: Paul Cézanne, Nature morte au plat de cerises et aux pêches, 1885-1887. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Don d’Adele R. Levy Fund, Inc., et M. et Mme. Armand S.Deutsch. © 2024 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licenciée par Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / image LACMA.
Other unmissable art shows this summer include Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World, David Hockney 25, and Turner: In Light and Shade.
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