My journey through Provence in the footsteps of my favourite artists

Times

10-05-2025

To my hero, the art critic Robert Hughes, the painter Paul Cézanne's studio just outside Aix-en-Provence was 'one of the sacred places of the modern mind'. You can still visit it, a sparse, high-ceilinged room with a huge window looking out into the haze of green branches and pink blossoms of a deep garden (£8, reopens on June 28; cezanne2025.com). It has been furnished (not untastefully) by its 21st-century curators with various objets that Cézanne's admirers will recognise from his still lifes: apples, onions, a statue of a cherub, a blue jug.
It was from here that Cézanne — a prudish, pious provincial with a bald head and shabby clothes — launched one of the most important revolutions in modern art. In painting after painting, Cézanne captured the dry intensity of a Provençal landscape burned to an archaic, shimmering austerity of elementary forms by the Mediterranean sun: a tower is a cylinder, a village a jumble of polygons as clumsy as children's wooden blocks. Cézanne always seems to me to be trying to grasp some essential quality of reality beyond superficial appearances that no painter before him had ever seen. It is from his painting that the history of modern art unfolds.
But Provence does not belong to Cézanne alone. Perhaps no landscape on earth has attracted such a concentration of artistic genius. The fierce clarity of Provençal light drew artists to it like fabulous moths: Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, André Derain. It has also, less exaltedly, lured innumerable tourists. Including, recently, me. I am a devoted fan of these 20th-century painters of the south of France (so much more exciting, in my opinion, than the often cloying and decorative impressionists of the preceding generation). It was time to see these famous, genius-catalysing landscapes for myself.
A devotee of the French transport system — the comfiest seats in the world are in first class on the TGV — I travelled by train. The first leg is the Eurostar to Paris. It's good to do it this way because the city's museums provide a good taste of what is to come — a Cézanne view of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire and Matisse's Luxury, Calm and Pleasure (the qualities I'm hoping to get out of this holiday) in the Musée d'Orsay and some colour-saturated Bonnards in the Petit Palais (£14, musee-orsay.fr; free, petitpalais.paris.fr). Grey Paris makes these visions of southern light glow all the more seductively. The hotel my girlfriend and I are staying in, the Experimental Marais, is well situated for museum-going (B&B doubles from £320; experimentalmarais.com). My anxious speculation about what an 'experimental' hotel might involve — sleeping pods? Robot waiters at the breakfast buffet? — is soon assuaged. It is a resolutely conventional hotel with a nice restaurant (though avoid the desert-dry chicken) and just a hint of chic bohemianism about the interior design. About my level of 'experimental'.
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From Paris, the train to Arles. The four-hour journey would be a nightmare in the UK; in France it's a privilege to sit in the TGV's luxurious armchairs for so long. Arles was where Van Gogh cut off his earlobe and gave it to a maid in a brothel — an act of morbid weirdness that he would be horrified to learn now defines his public image. Arles is also where he painted some of his most immortal masterpieces: The Yellow House, Starry Night over the Rhône and Café Terrace at Night. You can see the café and you can see the Rhône, and the past Van Gogh was painting from comes to seem less remote.
In those days before the railways (and TGV seats) the south seemed a foreign land to a painter from northern Europe: 'The brothels, the adorable little Arlésienne going to her First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world,' Van Gogh exclaimed in a letter. Here he felt closer to the tropics than to the watery, cloud-shadowed Netherlands of his birth. 'Not only in Africa but even from Arles onwards, you'll naturally find fine contrasts between reds and greens, blues and oranges, sulphur and lilac,' he wrote. The intensity of southern colour matched the intensity of Van Gogh's soul.
We love our B&B in Arles. Maison Huit is a 17th-century house crammed with arty junk (bowler hats, pictures, primitive statues, jars, sidetables) and presided over by the charming and attentive Julia, an artistic lady in a waistcoat and headscarf (B&B doubles from £76; sawdays.co.uk). In the mornings her sidekick Aladdin serves us breakfast (jam, croissants, yoghurt, coffee) in the ancient stone kitchen while she regales us with stories of growing up in Malaysia in the 1970s. One evening we are invited along to a soirée she is hosting to launch an exhibition by a luxuriously coiffed young French man who canoed all the way down the Rhône and did drawings of what he saw along the way. Julia introduces us to various of her friends, including a Shakespearean actor and a disarmingly mild-mannered retired bullfighter.
In Arles, I get sidetracked from impressionism by my infatuation with the town's 12th-century church, Saint Trophime (free; Place de la République). For my money it's one of the finest Romanesque churches in Europe. I love its great square fortress of a tower looming up against the blue Mediterranean sky above the shady low-slung cloisters. Best of all is the church's portal, with its ranks of grim-looking saints and bishops, and beneath them bulky flat-snouted lions chewing on the limp, formless bodies of sinners. We sit on the steps and eat strawberries, which are in season and on sale everywhere.
The Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles has no permanent collection of the artist's work (£8.50, free for those under 26; fondation-vincentvangogh-arles.org). It gets a couple of works at a time from other museums and is hit and miss. On our visit we get two of his sludgy social justice-y early pictures — the bowed and unhappy labourers toiling under a muddy sky in Peasant and Peasant Woman Planting Potatoes look even more abject than the stone sinners cowering on the portals of Saint Trophime. Basket of Potatoes makes the viewer glad that Van Gogh moved on to more promising plants such as sunflowers and irises. The main show is a retrospective of the artist Sigmar Polke who was, we learn, haunted by the symbolism of the potato. 'The tuber's power to germinate is what interests the artist because it can evoke artistic inspiration and production,' one of the signs explains. One of Polke's artworks is a wooden house with potatoes nailed onto it. Another is a potato on a stick twirling around in circles by a motor. 'He never abandoned the potato motif,' another sign says. 'I wish he had,' I sigh to my girlfriend as we trudge into the fourth room of potato art.
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It is surely an important sign of Van Gogh's genius that he did abandon the potato motif. Our next stop, St Rémy de Provence, puts us more in touch with the visionary later-period Van Gogh. He lived in the Saint-Paul de Mausole insane asylum here for a year (£8; alpillesenprovence.com). It's hard to imagine, amid the pleasant National Trust-style reconstructions of doctors' desks and iron bedsteads, how horrible this place must have seemed when Van Gogh stayed here in the grip of hallucinations, paranoid delusions, depression and mania. From his room he could hear the 'cries and howls' of the fellow patients like the noises made by 'beasts in a menagerie'. But outside Van Gogh feels almost eerily present. You can't go to Dickens's London and meet Magwitch and Oliver Twist, but you can go to St-Rémy-de-Provence and encounter Van Gogh's twisted silver olive trees and purple irises and the dark cypresses which, he wrote, were 'always occupying my thoughts as beautiful in line and form as an Egyptian obelisk, a splash of black in a sunny landscape' (Van Gogh is almost unique among great painters in writing well about his own art). The purple irises are especially present during our visit — out on every verge and in the garden of the lovely farmhouse Mas de la Croix where we're staying (room-only doubles from £72; sawdays.co.uk).
Aix is the city of Cézanne and one of the most beautiful in Europe, with its crumbling yellow streets, shady squares and fountains. Cézanne didn't paint the town. To get in touch with his spirit you have to travel out into the countryside. One way to do it is to take an Uber (or drive) out to the charming little town of Le Tholonet. You don't have to walk far from there to get splendid views of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the grey leonine crag of mountain that Cézanne painted again and again towards the end of his life and which towers over the surrounding plain. It is one of the great presences in the history of art and you feel it peering over your shoulder even when you're not looking at it — it's like going for a walk with the Mona Lisa.
For many people, Cézanne is one of those artists who is easier to admire than to love. Those formal, almost architectural landscapes are clearly important. But sometimes the sense of importance can become oppressive. Not so with Matisse. Everyone loves Matisse (just search for his name on Instagram), a painter of bright colours, blue Mediterranean skies and simple, legible designs. The place for Matisse, euphoniously enough, is Nice. He moved to the city in 1917 — to paint his pictures he believed he needed to access a serene state of mind that he couldn't find in 'any atmosphere other than that of the Côte d'Azur'.
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His most famous pictures of the city are of the interiors of shuttered rooms in apartments and hotels upholstered in womblike red carpets and curtains and drowsing in the warm summer light, with the blues of the sea and sky glimpsed beyond the windows as vivid as a dream. They are some of the most calming paintings ever made, marrying the peace of the interior with the oceanic calm of the sea. An exhibition at the Musée Matisse later this summer will show one of my favourite of these Matisse paintings, Interior with a Violin Case (£10; musee-matisse-nice.org). But we miss that. And sadly the weather we experience is a bit like that depicted in a painting in the museum's permanent collection — Tempête à Nice, with its surging sky and grey and brown sea. We retreat to our hotel room in the oddly named Mama Shelter Nice, which if not exactly womblike is certainly cheerful (verging on the zany). In our room there is a Bugs Bunny mask tied to the lamp — I would like to see what Matisse would have made of that (room-only doubles from £85; mamashelter.com).
Often, to go in search of writers and artists in the place they lived is to be disappointed by nondescript houses and unimpressive landscapes. Not Provence. It still shimmers — not only with that famous light but with the living memory of genius.James Marriott was a guest of Byway, which has 13 nights' B&B from £2,289pp, including train travel (byway.com); Experimental Marais (experimentalmarais.com); Mama Shelter Nice (mamashelter.com); and Sawday's (sawdays.co.uk)