Aix-en-Provence, the city of Cézanne, a village soul
The "luminous" city in the south of France is paying tribute to its most famous painter this year, offering a tour that immerses you in the intimate world of Paul Cézanne. This Spanish journalist from the daily newspaper "El Mundo" is clearly captivated by the place.
The man spent hours in a terrible downpour, at his easel planted in the middle of the countryside, finishing the silhouette that obsessed him: that of the sacred mountain of Sainte-Victoire, an insolent limestone massif culminating at a little over 1,000 meters above sea level. He was perhaps on his ninetieth painting. Back home, exhausted and at the end of his tether, Paul Cézanne – the father of modern painting, the precursor of Cubism and Fauvism, the master of Picasso and Matisse – collapsed like a mass. Two men found him unconscious, lying full length on the wet red earth, between his vines.
The next morning, his housekeeper wakes him up, and he decides to go out into nature once again, obsessed as he is with his work. But the pneumonia he contracted the previous evening prevents him from doing so. He dies on October 22, 1906, in the very place where he was born sixty-seven years earlier: Aix-en-Provence.
The former capital of Provence in the Middle Ages is today part of the metropolis of Marseille [under the official name of metropolis Aix-Marseille-Provence], itself located 30 kilometers away, in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône. It is one of those large, bright, elegant, pretty cities full of charm
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