Latest news with #Cézanne
Perth Now
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Cézanne the modernist influencer in NGA blockbuster
Modernist artworks from Germany's Museum Berggruen are on show in Australia for the first time, including big names such as Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen is the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra's winter blockbuster show. The museum collection has been touring internationally while its Berlin building is closed for renovation, and the exhibition has already visited half a dozen cities and been viewed by about a million people. But the Australian version is different - it's no out-of-the-box show, instead integrating art from giants of European modernism with works by Australian artists. The result is a story of the dynamic exchange of 20th century artistic ideas over decades and across the world, and the development of modernism in Australia. "I think it is the most accomplished and the most meaningful venue so far in the entire tour in terms of research into art history, because of this dialogue," said the head of Museum Berggruen, Dr Gabriel Montua. More than 80 works from the museum sit alongside 75 works from the national collection, by artists such as Russell Drysdale, Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black. The exhibition opens with Cézanne's experiments in form and perspective, on show with works by Australian artists like Drysdale and Ian Fairweather, who were influenced by his innovations. Rarely seen works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque show the breakthroughs of Cubism, hung with Australian artists such as Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Roy de Maistre. There are sections devoted to Paul Klee, Dora Maar and Henri Matisse, while a sculpture by Giacometti measuring more than two metres high represents the first time a such large scale Giacometti has been displayed down under. All of the artists in the exhibition ultimately come back to Cézanne's innovations, according to NGA curator David Greenhalgh. "He is the figurehead who inspired so much of what came after," said Greenhalgh. "There's a real sense of a lot of these artists looking at one another and deriving inspiration from one another." The Berggruen collection is the life's work of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who fled Germany before World War II and sold his collection to the German state in 2000, ensuring it would be available to the public. Many of the artists he collected were deliberately removed from German art collections, because they were deemed degenerate during the Nazi reign. The exhibition opens Saturday and runs till September 21. AAP travelled to Canberra with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia.
Irish Times
25-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Downsizing in Ranelagh: a sun-kissed slice of Provence in Dublin 6
A Ranelagh homeowner traded down to a house around the corner from her original three-storey abode, the smaller property a villa-style residence overlooking a large green space. It had, she explains, lovely period features including good ceiling heights, cornicing and ceiling roses, dado rails, architraves and timber floorboards. When she bought it, the reception rooms were upstairs, at entrance level, while the kitchen was downstairs, and ran the depth of the house. This lower-floor room opened out to the garden to the rear which, although south-facing, was relatively small. The homeowner brought in Mícheál de Siún of De Siún Architects and, in doing so, achieved a more balanced house, with all the living space on the same floor, now washed in light. She and her late husband had spent a lot of time in the south of France , and it was a painting, Paul Cézanne's Gardanne 1866, a view of the hill town of that name near Aix-en-Provence, that was the inspiration for the ambient renovation. Gardanne, 1866 by Paul Cézanne 'Light was also central to the brief,' says de Siún. By demolishing an outhouse and outside toilet, the architect explains, he gained space to the side of the house. This gave him the room to push the property out to its perimeter wall at entrance level. READ MORE The extension has added just 19sq m (204sq ft) of space, but it is the reorientation of the rooms to the left of the entrance hall, and the addition of glazing on three sides, that is transformative. Mícheál de Siún of De Siún Architects, who were behind the reinterpretation and renovation of the Ranelagh property. Photograph: Alan Betson Now, instead of a small and relatively enclosed back garden, the livingrooms overlook the aforementioned green, affording a front-row view of its trees, their colours changing with the seasons. The kitchen-diningroom now gives the impression of hanging above the boundary wall – the line of which follows the river Swan, which appears on maps dating from mid-1700s and now runs underground, de Siún says – and of being among those trees. 'It feels like you're floating,' de Siún says. The house plants too are thriving on all the sunlight. Exterior. Photograph: Alan Betson Extended area. Photograph: Alan Betson Kitchen area. Photograph: Alan Betson View to rear Renovation designed by De Siún Architects The glass is interspersed with timber upright fins to shield the space from the outside. These are finished in Owatrol oil in Weathered Grey. By inserting a long roof light into the centre of the room, areas that would have been discernibly darker have been illuminated. A beech dining set adds further warmth and is adjacent to a long built-in window seat. The olive-green colour used on the Teroco windows is RAL 6003, to which the steel, by H&M Ironwork, inside and out, was matched. The nature of this home's reinterpretation means the interior is washed in light from sun up to sundown. In the mornings the exterior fins are dappled with shadowplay from the leaves on the trees, backlit by the sun. Livingroom. Photograph: Alan Betson Window on to green space. Photograph: Alan Betson Hallway. Photograph: Alan Betson The elements of the bespoke kitchen, designed and made by Dean Cooper, have been 'scribed to fit', as de Siún puts it, meaning that the units have been constructed to specifically suit the period property's proportions and non-straight walls. It's subtly done and explains why the Nettle Soup-coloured cabinetry, a Colourtrend shade, looks so at home in the space. The Cézanne painting, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, helped the owner select the serene shades that feature on the walls and woodwork. The kitchen island was also made to measure; it's 1m wide and 2.5m long, with ribbed ends to add texture and to echo the character of the architraves, de Siún explains. All this attention to detail knits together the kitchen area, in the old front room, and newly added dining-cum-reading nook. Behind a half wall is additional space housing a guest WC, cloakroom and side entrance via granite steps down to the front garden, all hidden from view from the cooking area. The wallpaper in the lavatory has a painterly quality too; this time it could be a Dutch master. WC. Photograph: Alan Betson Bathroom. Photograph: Alan Betson Exterior. Photograph: Alan Betson Across the hall the interconnecting rooms remain much as they were. Their large sash windows continue to wash the space in light from front to back. The painted cast-iron fireplaces endure, and the beautifully engineered set of original fold-back doors still sit flush with the walls. The blackened floorboards, which had possibly been covered in a bitumen paint, have been sanded back and are now stained a soft matt honey tone, a colour from Osmo oil tints. This helps bring this entire upper floor together. Here, there is a full-size burl walnut grand piano that belonged to the family of the homeowner's late husband and had to be winched up to the second floor of her former home, she recalls. 'They had to take out a window,' she says, delightedly reporting that there was no such drama when bringing it into this home. Her Aunt Molly's dining table is also in this room, and it is lovely to see such pieces with stories on show. Downstairs, the principal bedroom has an en suite bathroom that features microcememt tinted a bleached terracotta. The colour, Fleetwood Shell Coral, is a replica of the sun-warmed rooftops of the Cézanne. Microcement, de Siún explains, 'is worked on by hand and has a finish that feels like polished concrete. The colour is handmade per batch. The owner didn't want to use tiles and there are no seams or joins.' Now when the family gathers, they can wander between the reception rooms and the kitchen-diningroom. The grandchildren, who often excuse themselves after dinner, can jump over the wall with a ball and have a kickabout, surveyed, but only from a distance, by their parents. The work, which was executed by MSVI builders, was a winner in the home extension refurbishment, medium size, at this year's Building and Architect of the Year awards. 'It's very easy to manage,' says the owner. 'I have just 18 steps down to bed, rather than the 50 up to bed in the previous house.'
Irish Examiner
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Experiencing the light-filled landscapes of Provence that inspired Cézanne's works
It is quite astonishing to realise that a painting few people wanted to buy a little over a century ago is now worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Paul Cézanne's The Card Players became the most expensive piece of art in the world in 2011 when it was bought by the Qatar royal family for $250m. It has since been overtaken by two other masterpieces, Willem de Kooning's Interchange for $300m in 2015 and Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi for $450m in 2017. But that hardly diminishes the magnitude of what The Card Players achieved — a painting from 1890-'92 of two of Cézanne's humble estate workers playing at a table in a dark room. Cézanne, along with other contemporary impressionist and post-impressionist artists like Vincent Van Gogh, was not appreciated in his time. But unlike the Dutch genius, Cézanne did not die in poverty. His father, Louis-Auguste, was a successful banker who gave his son an allowance enabling him to follow his dream of becoming a painter. And he and his two sisters, Marie and Rose, inherited the family estate, Jas de Bouffan. But despite producing countless paintings of the surrounding countryside, he was never accepted in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence which refused to exhibit his work. Now a further ignominy has been discovered. Jas de Bouffan, where he lived for 40 years, is currently being restored for its first ever public opening which will coincide with a landmark exhibition of his work, Cézanne at Jas de Bouffan, from June 28 to October 12. Cézanne Paul (1839-1906). États-Unis, Chicago (IL), The Art Institute of Chicago. 1942.457. During the renovation, workers discovered an unknown painting on an inside wall of the house — under a layer of white paint. Someone who owned the beautiful period home after Cézanne's time was so unimpressed by the fresco they simply painted over it. Initial signs suggest it is a scene of boats on a river and it is now being restored. The grand salon of the house was once covered in Cézanne's frescos. But when the artist started to become recognised years after his death the paintings on plaster were cut from the walls, put in frames and sold around the world. We are on a tour of the estate and work is still busily going on for the grand opening. Piles of calade, large pebbles native to Provence, are ready for cobblestone-style groundwork, ditches are dug for power cables, and a large reservoir, which looks like a swimming pool, is to be cleaned. A beautiful alley of trees is much like it appeared in Cézanne's The Allée of Chestmut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan. The estate, once in the countryside, is now surrounded by urban development. Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne's beloved mountain which he painted no fewer than 77 times, and which was once clearly visible from the property, is now hidden from view. We are lucky to be the first recent visitors to the estate — it used to be by appointment only — which was taken over by the local authority in 1994. From this summer, admirers of the artist will be able to walk in his footsteps and stand where he painted many of his works in an upstairs studio his father built for him, lit by a large skylight. It was here, surrounded by 15 hectares of vineyards and orchards, that he produced his still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, many of which will feature in the exhibition in the local Musée Granet. The Card Players was one of a series of five painted here in the 1890s. During the renovation of Jas de Bouffan, workers discovered an unknown painting on an inside wall of the house — under a layer of white paint. Someone who owned the beautiful period home after Cézanne's time was so unimpressed by the fresco they simply painted over it. Initial signs suggest it is a scene of boats on a river and it is now being restored. The ground floor and an upstairs room are being prepared for the opening but others will not be finished until next year. Visitors will also be able to visit the studio he built, the 'Atelier des Lauves', after being forced to sell Jas de Bouffan in 1899 to give his sisters their share of their father's inheritance. The artist produced his final paintings here from 1902 to his death in 1906, working daily in a room flooded with light. The studio on Lauves Hill overlooking Aix is being restored and will contain many of his possessions, a permanent legacy of Cézanne 2025. Cézanne adored the light of Provence and once said: 'When you're born there, it's hopeless, nothing else is good enough.' We experience that light ourselves when we tour the abandoned Bibémus quarries where the painter did countless landscapes with the giant sandstone rocks and Mont Sainte-Victoire in the background. A new public trail will be opened leading to the quarries to the east of the city. Replicas of his work are embedded in places he loved, particularly on the Terrain des Peintres, a terrace near his studio where there are nine copies on enamalled plates. You can follow his development through the decades, from his early impressionist paintings to the cubism and abstraction of his latter days, a development that inspired Picasso to call him 'the father of us all'. Visitors will also be able to visit the studio he built, the 'Atelier des Lauves', after being forced to sell Jas de Bouffan in 1899 to give his sisters their share of their father's inheritance. Art and Provence are eternally linked and visitors seeking more cultural enlightenment should make their way to the amazing Chateau La Coste, owned by Irish hotelier and developer Paddy McKillen. It's a working biodynamic vineyard featuring huge art installations by the likes of Damien Hirst and Irish artist Sean Scully, and by famed architects like Tadao Ando from Japan and Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer. Bono's pal, Guggi, features with a giant bronze chalice along with works by Tracey Emin, Yoko Ono, REM's Michael Stipe and many more. We walk through long rows of grapes to reach Bob Dylan's Rail Car, a real American box car set on rail tracks. Once used to transport paper rolls by an Oregon lumber company, its cover has been replaced by a maze of sculptured iron. Dylan said the sight and sound of freight trains was part of his childhood. A short time later we bump into Paddy McKillen's sister Maire, who tells us it was she who originally found the vineyard for her brother in 2002. The Belfast-born chef had settled in Aix because of the quality and range of its foods and herbs and Paddy fell in love with the area while visiting. He asked her to find him a farm. Writer Jim Gallagher with a statue of Paul Cezanna. 'I knew he was serious because he's a real visionary,' says Maire, who retains her soft Belfast accent after decades in France. 'Once I found it, he said, 'this place is too beautiful to keep for ourselves'. 'He loves art and the artistic process and he began to invite people down, people he knew or people whose work he liked like architect Richard Rogers. 'They came because of their love of Provence — and Provence is why we are still here.' Rogers went on to design a spectacular 120m long gallery on a hillside overlooking the chateau and surrounding landscape. Beginning with just a cafe, the estate now has a five-star hotel, a four-star hotel, six restaurants, and the vineyard produces up to 900,000 bottles of wine a year, mostly rosé. The final stop on our Cézanne-inspired art tour is the Gallifet Art Centre in Aix, which specialises in the work of young up-and-coming artists. Nicolas Mazet opened the gallery in his 19th- century home in 2010 and says they show the work of young artists inspired by Cézanne's never-give-up attitude. Cézanne 2025 is a fitting tribute to a painter whose work was forward-looking yet rooted in tradition. The reopening of his house and studio simply give us two more excuses to visit the fabled region and explore the enduring beauty of luminous Aix-en-Provence. Jim was a guest of Aix-en-Provence tourism. Provencal landscape, France, showing Mont Ste Victoire, from the same spot in Aix-en-Provence where Cezanne painted the same landscape as it was in the 19th century. ESCAPE NOTES For more information on the Cézanne celebrations see For more information on visiting Aix and Provence see and Where to stay If you're staying in Aix, a comfortable base is the four-star Hotel Aquabella which has a large outdoor pool, a smaller inside pool and spa with sauna and steam rooms. Its L'Orangerie restaurant serves up a lovely prawn linguine which ticks all my boxes. Where to eat In the city centre, a good place to eat and watch the world go by is the lively terrace of Le Mirabeau, which has very friendly staff. For dinner, the rooftop terrace of La Fromagerie du Passage specialises in cheese dishes. If you want to spoil yourself, try lunch in the beautiful L'Atelier des Lodges, which has a terrace with a spectacular view of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Or try the luxurious Villa Gallici, a five-star Relais & Chateaux hotel based in an 18th-century mansion which won a recent Cézanne menu competition to reinterpret Provencal cuisine. La Taula, its gourmet restaurant, is a haven of style and tranquility overlooking one of the hotel's pools. Artistic inspiration The sculpture park and organic winery at Chateau La Coste is open seven days a week from 10am – 7pm. The walking trail through the 600-acre park is €15. Six restaurants have various opening times. Gallifet Art centre is currently open from noon to 6pm, Wednesday to Saturday, price €6. From June 1, it is open every day except Monday during the summer months. There is also a restaurant, shop and apartment to rent.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Learning to Love Cézanne in His Picture-Perfect Hometown
Paul Cézanne's artistic muse had sweeping shoulders, an enigmatic face and majestic beauty that loomed over his life's work. But that obsession was a mountain, not a woman. Seduced by the sun's chameleon-like effect on its limestone ridges, Cézanne painted more than 80 versions of Montagne Ste.-Victoire, a granite massif near his hometown, the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. Aix is where Cézanne (1839-1906) was born and first put brush to palette. It's where he painted many of his masterpieces, and it's where he died. This year, from June to October, the city is honoring that legacy with a series of events linked to the reopening on June 28 of both the renovated Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, the artist's 18th-century family manor, and the Atelier des Lauves, his last workshop. This celebration, Cézanne 2025, made Aix one of The New York Times 52 Places to Go in 2025 and will bring up to 400,000 more visitors to a city that's already a prime summer destination. Key sites will be open only for guided visits, so reserve ahead. This outpouring of admiration would have never happened a century ago. The Aixois generally derided the painter during his lifetime: The Impressionists aimed to please with their pretty palette. The Post-Impressionist Cézanne shocked with his bold colors and geometric forms. 'It takes time to like Cézanne because he is more complex than you realize,' said Bruno Ely, director of the Musée Granet, which will present the largest collection of Cézanne's work to date as part of Cézanne 2025. Blvd. Aristide Briand Paris France St.-Sauveur Cathedral Aix-en- Provence Rue Mignet Las Galinas Place Richelme Palais de Justice Aix-en-Provence Palais Comtale Bar Le Grillon Rue d'Italie Cours Mirabeau Mazarin District Ave. Victor Hugo Rue cardinale Musée Granet Gallifet Cours Gambetta Maison du Collectionneur Blvd. du Roi René Château de Vauvenargues 2 miles Barrage de Bimont Jardin des Peintres Ste.-Victoire Priory Atelier des Lauves Bastide du Jas de Bouffan Bibemus Quarries Croix de Provence Detail area Montagne Ste.-Victoire A51 France A8 Bastide Bourrelly A52 By The New York Times Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
My journey through Provence in the footsteps of my favourite artists
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; 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, free, 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; 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'. • 10 of the most beautiful places in France (and how to see them) 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; 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; 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. • The best things to do in Provence 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; 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; 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'. • Explore our full guide to France 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; 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; 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 Marriott was a guest of Byway, which has 13 nights' B&B from £2,289pp, including train travel ( Experimental Marais ( Mama Shelter Nice ( and Sawday's (
