When banker Louis-Auguste Cézanne bought the Jas de Bouffan mansion and park outside Aix-en-Provence in 1859, he assumed his only son would follow him into the family business and enjoy the place as a county retreat. He never dreamt that within a year the grand salon would be a studio, covered with violent, clumsy, bizarre images, and in the central alcove his own impasto portrait: fierce, unyielding face in profile, engrossed in his newspaper, austerely indifferent to his son’s paintings. A decade after the patriarch’s death, Paul Cézanne still introduced guests to “le papa” glowering on that wall.
Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan at Aix’s Musée Granet is riveting and revelatory from the moment of its opening coup: reuniting a dozen murals which Cézanne in his twenties painted directly on to the salon walls. Not seen together since 1907, when they began to be removed panel by panel, sold and dispersed worldwide, they range from “Bather and Rocks”, a tough, ungainly nude holding up a boulder against a torrent, acquired by Walter Chrysler, to classical figure allegories “The Four Seasons”. They are a prism into a young mind turbulent but already forging his path: taking from tradition to make painting new.
Unfolding how he did so, the show is, of course, ravishing. Rilke wrote of landscapes “made with the blue of the air, the blue of the sea and red roofs conversing together against a green ground”; to see these paintings in Aix is to understand Cézanne’s visceral connection to reality, even as he transformed nature, places he walked, swam, climbed, into near-abstract forms: modern art’s foundational story.
Many radiant pieces demonstrate that formal process: “House at Bellevue”, a geometric arrangement of honey-hued stone walls, steps, terraces, rows of pines; massive, angular orange cliffs below a strip of purple sky and blurred treetops in “The Bibémus Quarry”; proto-cubist houses rising above the water in “The Sea at L’Estaque”, once owned by Picasso.
A majestic, surging “Mont St Victoire”, sun sculpting the close-up mountain face into patches of light and shadow, found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Nazi-era collection, makes its debut in a Cézanne show. Illuminating juxtapositions include paired “Grove at Jas de Bouffan” paintings, dense in 1871, luminous, freer, in 1875-76, demonstrating impressionism’s influence, and two splendid architectonic harmonies of variegated greens and ochres on an open plain: the Courtauld’s “Tall Trees at Jas de Bouffan” (1883), airy and rustling, and the Guggenheim’s “Neighbourhood of Jas de Bouffan” (1885-87) sombre, receding into emptiness, imbued with resignation.
The Granet’s argument, that just as Provence’s landscape shaped Cézanne, so the Roman city Aix and the 18th-century Jas were pivotal to his sensibility, poised between classicism and modernity, is amplified in a wider summer festival Cézanne 2025. It offers trails to the Jas, restored following a long closure, the studio Les Lauves and, for the brave, descent to the Bibémus rocks. So biography becomes immersive experience, with rewarding discoveries. In 2023, conservators at the Jas unveiled a fragmented unknown Cézanne, “Harbour Entrance” (1860), aping Claude’s port scenes. Also uncovered was a graceful plaster relief of Leda and the Swan, part of the house’s original decor; Cézanne passed it daily — inspiration, we see now, for his quirky painting of the same subject.
In his privileged salon, Cézanne both embraced and fought the Jas’s classical sumptuousness. Across the Granet’s downstairs galleries, fantasies such as “Game of Hide and Seek” (1862-64), imitating a Nicolas Lancret fête galante, alternate with rough, near-expressionist portraits in his early couillard (ballsy) manner, paint slathered on with a knife.
His schoolmate Émile Zola, poor, fatherless and physically weedy, looks particularly despondent, but all the friends — poet Antony Valabrègue, geologist Antoine-Fortune Marion — from Cézanne’s precious youthful coterie appear dark, introspective, downcast. “Paul is a horrible painter,” Valabrègue groaned. “Every time he paints one of his friends it seems as if he were avenging himself for some hidden injury”.
Looming over this evocative gathering is a second paternal portrait, fearful, affectionate: “The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Evenement” — a leftwing newspaper, employing young Zola. Louis-Auguste would not have touched it. Nor did he care for the picture depicted at his shoulder, and on display alongside: “Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup”, built from thick paint scrapings, crustily refusing convention, proclaiming independence.
Not until after his father’s death in 1886 did Cézanne dare his sole full-frontal view of the Jas. “House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan” (1885-87), from Prague, is the centrepiece of the upstairs landscape galleries, its monumental facade slightly swaying, the blue shutters echoing the clarity of the sky, offset by a brilliant red roof. Earlier depictions, as beautiful, are comparably hesitant: “The House at the Jas de Bouffan”, obscured by trees; “The Pool at Jas de Bouffan” playing with impressionist reflections on water.
From 1887, until he was forced to sell it in 1899, the Jas became Cézanne’s laboratory for three final grand series, all musing on painterly illusion: bathers, still lives, portraits of the estate’s workers.
Friezes of compressed female figures in broken outlines merge with landscape, echoing its slopes, mounds, trees, in “Bathers”: stylised imaginings of Mediterranean unity recalling Poussin, anticipating Matisse. The gauche young friends return, transmuted into awkwardly wading, undressing, reclining youths in “Bathers at Rest”.
“Still Life with Cherries and Apricots” and “Still Life with Apples and Melon”, ripe, rich, oozing, represent the French art of pleasure at its apogee, even as shifting viewpoints, tilting objects, bare areas of canvas — “Kitchen Table”, MoMA’s “Still Life with Apples” — assert painting as artifice.
Finally come “the people of Jas de Bouffan”, grave, humane, fateful. “The Card Players”’ columnar forms, emphatically separate, exist in contemplative, flickering equilibrium. Buttoned into a geometrically pleated blue dress “Woman with a Coffee Pot”, bearing work-hardened hands, is as rigid as her cafetière. Reserved in expression, lively in the restless strokes and dabs of colour, “Man with Crossed Arms” also has crossed eyes, one seen from above, one from below.
In “Peasant in a Blue Smock”, 1896-97, Cézanne at the Jas comes full circle: the worker, stoic, dignified, pensive, poses before a folding screen painted by Cézanne in 1859 with an 18th-century pastoral couple. In this painting of a painting, the peasant, weighty and substantial, is placed to obscure the screen man and imply that the sketchy screen woman, faceless, translucent, is his reverie of youth. Both express Cézanne’s hopes of art as eternal.
“Today everything is changing, but not for me,” he wrote shortly before he died. “I live in the town of my boyhood, and I rediscover the past in the faces of the people of my own age . . . who obey the rules of time”.
To October 12, museegranet-aixenprovence.fr, cezanne2025.com
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