Categories: French Culture, Provence

Discussed in this Episode

• Cézanne 2025
• Cézanne Year
• Cézanne exhibit Aix-en-Provence
• Musée Granet Cézanne
• Jas de Bouffan
• Mont Sainte-Victoire
• Atelier Cézanne
• Cézanne travel itinerary
• Art travel Provence
• Cézanne podcast
• Cézanne still life
• Cézanne legacy
• Cézanne and Zola

540 Cézanne with Elyse (April 6)

Introduction

[00:00:15] Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 540, cinq-cent-quarante.

Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.

Today on the podcast

[00:00:30] Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about the legendary artist, Paul Cézanne. We delve into the reasons why 2025 is being celebrated as Cézanne’s year, the upcoming major exhibits in his honor, and the intriguing life story of this misunderstood genius. If you’re an art lover or simply curious about the man behind the famous still lifes and landscapes, you won’t want to miss this episode.

Podcast supporters

[00:01:02] Annie: This podcast is supported by donors and listeners who buy my tours and services, including my Itinerary Consult Service, my GPS self-guided tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, or take a day trip with me around the Southwest of France in my electric car. You can browse all of that at my boutique: JoinUsinFrance.com/boutique.

And remember, Patreon supporters get the podcast ad-free as soon as it’s ready. Click on the link in the show notes to enjoy this Patreon reward for as little as $3 per month.

The Magazine segment

[00:01:36] Annie: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll discuss a question that has come up a lot recently and that most of the people I interact with during itinerary consultations and such, ask in one form or another: How are the French feeling about American tourists these days?

Overview of Cézanne Year

[00:02:06] Annie: Bonjour, Elyse.

[00:02:07] Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.

[00:02:08] Annie: We are going to talk about a man today, a man who painted a lot, Mr. Cézanne, Paul Cézanne.

[00:02:17] Elyse: Yes, yes.

[00:02:18] Annie: This year is Cézanne’s year, that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to talk about him, is because in Aix-en-Provence, where he’s from, they are doing a lot of events, to celebrate his life and his work. So you’ll tell us all about that as well.

But if you’re going to be coming to Aix-en-Provence, you need to know about this because you’ll need to reserve your ticket to go see that.

[00:02:41] Elyse: Yes, absolutely. And lots of people do go to Aix, of course, as part of their visit to Provence, and if you are interested in seeing a very big exhibit of painting, which includes, I think they said over 56 works by Cézanne, just know that you will have to reserve. It will be in the Musée Granet, which is the big fine arts museum, if you want to call it big, for Aix it’s big, in the center of Aix, right off the Cours Mirabeau.

And the dates for beginning of reserving will open soon. It hasn’t yet opened, but just be aware of that. Put it in your calendar, because it will be a big event.

[00:03:19] Annie: What are the dates? When does the exhibit start?

[00:03:21] Elyse: The exhibit starts the 28th of June, so it will be late, but it goes through into the 12th of October, which means all summer long. They’re really gearing it to the tourist season, and of course, it’s a big, big season in the Aix area.

It’s also the major event that has led them to do this, because at first I was thinking, "Hmm, this is not the year he was born. This is not the year he died. So what’s so special about this year?"

Well, it turns out that it’s because the family home, which was this magnificent country kind of mansion, southern, typical Provencal beautiful home that you… you can… you’ve probably seen in other places, on this huge estate, it’s called The Jas du Bouffan, and it’s several kilometers outside of Aix.

Of course, I’m sure at the time, it was a lot more farther out than it is today. But it was closed for years, and is in the process of being reopened as a cultural center and an art center centered around Cézanne.

And so the event is the opening of part of it, because not all of it, it hasn’t actually been completely finished, but this is the reason why they decided to declare this Cézanne year in Aix.

[00:04:34] Annie: So, this is not the same as the small work place that we’ve been able to visit for a long time?

[00:04:41] Elyse: No, that actually is the second studio that in the course of his life, he bought that studio, that house with that studio that, of course, you have visited and I have visited, quite a few times. At the end after, in fact it’s part of the history of his life and his work, but he sold The Jas du Bouffan, when his mother died, which was in 1899.

He was already a relatively old man. His mother was very old at the time, and he bought this other small house and turned that into the studio, and that’s the one that we’ve been able to visit all of these years.

Now, I don’t know, obviously somebody bought the property or the city of Aix had bought up the property of The Jas du Bouffan. I don’t know what it was being used for all of these years, but now it is the property of Aix-en-Provence.

So that is why they’re going to turn it into a really big… it sounds like it’s going to be very exciting when it’s finished, because it will be a space that shows his studio, that also is an exhibit space for some of his work and has ateliers and there will be interactive activities. It’s turning into a big, big deal.

So, not that Aix-en-Provence needs to have more tourists, but this will be a lot of fun, and it will certainly be wonderful for those people who like his work and are interested in seeing the point of view from which he did a lot of his painting.

[00:06:03] Annie: Okay, fantastic. All right.

Cézanne’s Early Life and Background

[00:06:05] Annie: So now tell us about Cézanne as a person. I don’t know how you want to organize this, you want to start with his life or his work, or…?

[00:06:13] Elyse: Well, I thought I’d just start with a little bit of an introduction, but now here’s my question for you, Annie. I know that this isn’t necessarily the field that you know the most in, but if I say to you "Paul Cézanne," is there a painting or an image that comes to your mind?

[00:06:30] Annie: Yes. An image of men sitting around a table, I think they’re playing cards.

[00:06:37] Elyse: Very good. Okay. Oh, that’s not the one I thought you were going to say, but there you go, okay.

Cézanne’s Artistic Style and Major Works

[00:06:42] Elyse: So in fact, before we actually talk about the details of his life, which are really quite interesting, his work, he was indeed very, very prolific. He was rather obsessive and very prolific. But his work can actually be divided into several categories.

He wasn’t, in a sense, all over the place, and he wasn’t an artist that did only one kind of thing, but actually, the categories are… These are the categories. He painted, of course, lots and lots of still lifes.

His famous apples, which I will talk about, because that’s one of the things that I actually love. He did a lot of portraits, and his wife, Hortense, was painted 45 times, if you can imagine that.

He painted his son. He painted other people that were his friends.

So first, of course, we have the apple still life paintings. Those are one of the biggest categories. And then you have the portrait paintings, and then you have the landscapes where he did, of course, Mont Sainte-Victoire, and he did also L’estaque and everything connected to the south around Aix-en-Provence. And he did The Card Players. And those are some of the most famous.

They’re also, ironically, to my great surprise, I was looking this up at the end of the day yesterday, you know, like many of the artists that were alive at that time, the impressionists and the post-impressionists, many of them, they became really famous, of course, after they died. And of course, their work became very valuable after they died.

And in 2011, one of the card players was bought by a Qatari princess for $250 million. And in 2011, that was the most expensive painting ever sold. It has been, there have been others that have been sold for more since then, and almost all of them bought by somebody from Qatar, unfortunately or fortunately, because apparently what they are doing is they’re making a collection that will eventually be, hopefully, a museum open to the public.

But it’s kind of ironic, that it is one of the card players that was chosen to be honored by being bought for that amount of money. So you have the still lifes, you have the portraits, you have the card players, you have the landscapes.

And at the very end of his life, he did a small collection of paintings that were group painting, were almost a reference back to classical painting, Manet and then people from before. And those were, in fact, some of the paintings that, among others, inspired Picasso, who considered that Cézanne was, to quote… ‘The father of us all’.

He was a painter who was not understood, he was not the only one. He became relatively successful and important at the very end of his life, but the true value of his vision, if you want to call it that, really came about with the generation that came after him.

Cézanne’s Personal Life and Relationships

[00:09:37] Annie: Yeah. One thing that interested me, because I… I knew we were going to record this, so I’ve been reading up a little bit about him, and it interested me that he was raised in a wealthy family, so making money was never a huge issue for him. And his father being a banker, wanted him to be a lawyer and kind of pushed him in that direction, but he went to school with Emile Zola. Was that… Is that right?

[00:10:06] Elyse: Yes, that’s right.

[00:10:07] Annie: So, I mean, extraordinary circumstance. You have these two geniuses in school together, and it’s Emile Zola who apparently pushed him to say, "Look, follow your artistic passion." Because he was doing law school and at the same time going to art school on the side. And Zola, who I think is a genius, I love Zola’s writing, because he crafted such fantastic stories of Paris over the decades.

I think that’s great luck that a man of wealth… He could have been you know, sipping margaritas on the beach or something, but he decided to become obsessed with painting and with creating something, making something.

And what he did was quite extraordinary. I love his painting. I have to say, you know, I find him very interesting. It’s easy to understand what’s happening in his work.

Like, you see these guys playing cards. This is something you see in real life. You just see people sitting around playing cards and smoking cigarettes, you know? It’s like he took a picture, but he made it a lot better than a picture. I don’t know.

[00:11:16] Elyse: Yeah. Well, he certainly had a vision that he developed.

His Childhood

[00:11:18] Elyse: But talking about his childhood. So he was indeed born in Aix, and he did die in Aix. He lived basically his adult life, he spent half the time in Aix and half the time in Paris. And in the last few years of his life, he went back to his house in, the smaller house in Aix, and stayed there.

He basically gave up on Paris. He felt more comfortable going outside and painting his beautiful Mont Sainte-Victoire.

But he wasn’t as wealthy as you think he was, that is, his father actually was… It’s interesting. His father was a businessman who apparently managed to accumulate enough money in a hat business that he and a friend of his opened up a private bank.

Now, I can’t imagine what that’s like in… Cezanne was born in 1839, so this was basically when he was eight years old, his father… I don’t know how you do that, to just say, "Okay, I’m going to open up a bank."

But anyway, so they were wealthy, but they were not super rich. But what did happen, and of course, yes, like in a lot of other cases, coming from a nice upper class Catholic family, his father wanted him to follow him into the bank. He wanted him to be a lawyer or a businessman. Cezanne started taking drawing classes.

It’s interesting to note too that in the middle of the 19th century, it was not considered to be namby-pamby to want to take classes, art classes. It was something that a lot of people did.

And so he started taking classes and developed this passion for it.

A Lifelong Friendship

[00:12:45] Elyse: But the story about him and Emile Zola is wonderful. Zola was a year younger than him, and they met in the school yard of this private, basically this private Catholic school that they were sent to in Aix. And Zola was from an immigrant Italian family. So he was being picked on a lot. I don’t know if Zola himself had a strong accent or what.

But Cezanne came to his defense in the school yard, and this is, we’re talking about maybe 9, 10 years olds, you know, kids that age of maybe 10, 11, and defended him.

That is how they became friends. And the story is, and I love it, is that to thank him, Zola came to school the next day with a basket filled with apples. And apples became synonymous in the mind and in the eyes of Cezanne with a special object, a magical object. You know? I mean, all of the still lifes, he did hundreds of still life paintings, sometimes with pears, sometimes with pictures and things.

But of course, the object that was the most important for him were these wonderful apples. And he’s quoted as saying later on in his life that he is going to make apples look so incredible and so magical that everybody in Paris is going to go, "Wow." You know? That this was his objective in life, to turn an apple into something almost mystical.

I just love that story. I mean, who knows if it’s exactly true like that. But it is indeed true that he and Zola stayed close friends their entire lives. There are actually a couple of French movies, one that was recent with an actor, Guillaume Canet, of the episode in their lives, which apparently was falsely told, recounted again, afterwards, where there’s a story about, they stop being friends because Zola wrote a book called L’Œuvre, which is a book about an artist who is misunderstood and everything.

And for some reason, the rumor circulated that Cezanne was so offended by it because he was the model for the person in the book that they stopped being friends. And it turns out to be absolutely not true. I have a book of their correspondence, all their lives, they wrote letters back and forth to each other, and they did until Zola died, he actually died three years before Cezanne.

So it’s a wonderful story and it shows the kind of loyalty he had. Because the problem with Cezanne was that he was very solitary. He was not very sociable. What happened was, his father basically did not want him, of course, to become an artist, but when he… he basically flunked out of university.

Now whether he did that on purpose, who knows? You know, it could have been that he was just not paying attention to his classes. He had two younger sisters, so he was the only son.

And at that point, his father basically said, begrudgingly, "I’ll give you a very small stipend. You go up to Paris basically for a year. If you can figure out that, you know, you can be an artist in a year, fine. If not, you come back here, you come back and you start working with me."

Moving to Paris

[00:15:42] Elyse: So he went to Paris at the age of 20. And, I can’t even imagine, he was apparently timid, and he was also very uncomfortable in social situations. But he managed, maybe through Zola, I really don’t know, but he managed to make friends with a couple of the impressionist painters.

And the person that became the most important in his life was Camille Pissarro…. who was nine years older than him, but who basically became like a surrogate father for him his entire life.

And Pissarro liked him, and he apparently found his work somewhat interesting, and so he took him under his wing.

He also did something which I didn’t know you had to apply to do because not everybody got in. He applied to be a copyist at the Louvre, and this is something where you either are accepted or you’re not accepted. So for a year, he became a copyist at the Louvre and there he met Renoir, who also became a lifelong friend, and Sisley and a couple of the other impressionist artists.

And they’re all, at this point, let’s see, Pissarro was born in 1830, so they’re all, let’s say, between 20 and 30 years old, you know, the whole group. And of all of this group, because of course there were the others, there was Monet and eventually who he became friends with, but the people that he was closest to his whole life were Pissarro and Renoir, and his son actually wound up becoming very good friends with Renoir’s son, later on, when they were both adults. So he did his best, he tried, but he was not getting anywhere as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t sell anything…

[00:17:19] Annie: He got rejected from the Salon several times, right?

[00:17:23] Elyse: Oh, well yes, that’s a little bit later already. That’s in 1874.

But even before then, so you could imagine, we’re talking about in 1859 he spends a year in Paris. He goes back to Aix, he takes more classes interestingly enough, he takes more classes, but he’s determined that he really wants to be an artist.

Spanish Period and Influences

[00:17:42] Elyse: And what I find interesting is that he goes to Spain, and he’s admirative of a couple of Spanish artists.

One of them is Ribera and the other is Zubillan. These are artists that were, from what I call the black bleak period of Spanish painting. You know, this is like 18th century, 1700 painters, many of the scenes are religious scenes, but very dramatic with lots of black outline and all this kind of stuff.

And he really admires their work, and if you see… I have a couple of books, so if you see a couple of his earlier paintings before he really winds up opening up with the impressionist influence on him, they’re kind of like that. You know, they’re a little bit like what you described with The Card Players.

There’s a lot of black outline. They’re kind of somber. There’s not much relief in the painting, and he winds up having the very first exhibit of his life, of all places, in Spain. I’m not even sure in which city. I don’t know if it was in Madrid or not, but he actually gets an exhibit in Spain.

He goes back to Aix and then he decides, okay, he’s going to try again and he goes back up to Paris, and thankfully, Pissarro says to him, "Come with me to Auvers-sur-Oise."

This is where he was living. This is where many of the impressionist artists had had houses, I don’t know, for some of them it may have been second homes. Renoir was from a family that had enough money to have a second home.

And he stayed with him for a while out there, and under the tutelage of Pissarro and the other impressionist artists, he lightened up his palette and he started painting out of doors.

And yet he never did, of course, what you see when we go to Orsay, you know, and he’s included in the impressionist, post-impressionist, huge section of course in Orsay. But what you notice, of course, with his work, is that it never has that light, fluid, airy quality of the other impressionists. But it helped him, he did paint out of doors.

He lightened up a little bit, but his interests were not necessarily becoming like an impressionist, you know, fluffy clouds and pretty flowers and stuff like that, which of course, you know, were beautiful, but that was not where he was going. He started doing kind of half and half, where he said, "No, I’d like to do more painting that’s really about people."

He was interested in people, interestingly enough even though he was not very sociable, so that’s when he started doing pictures of The Card Players, pictures of the portraits of people, and they are of course studio paintings.

And one of the things, it’s interesting what you just said about why you like his painting or even The Card Players, he wasn’t really interested in naturalism. He was interested in an effect, he said he used, he wanted to use color like light, which is very complicated to do because a lot of his work is very dark in the sense that it’s saturated blues, and reds, and greens, and colors like that.

There’s not a lot of transparency in his work, but he used the people that he was painting like they were objects.

And he even said later on that he wanted the models, and of course his wife, Hortense, there’s a whole lot of stories about their relationship, but he met her because she was a professional model. And when they met, he was 30. He was already 30, so it was in 1869 and she was 19, and she was working as a professional model.

I think she was actually introduced to him by Renoir, one of them, and one of the reasons he liked her is because she, and apparently this was the reputation she had, was that she could sit for hours without budging, without moving at all.

And he said, apparently at one point when, because he did so many, so many portraits of her, he apparently at one point when she moved, you can imagine his, what kind of personality he had, he said to her, " Remember, you’re a pomme, you’re an apple. You’re not supposed to move. Apples don’t move."

So, you know, it’s like for him, human beings were simply objects, to paint the way he painted the apples.

And so the whole first half of his career as an artist is really concentrated on the idea of expressing what he wanted to with mostly in portraits and in still lifes with color. That is when of course he participates in the huge impressionist, what has come to be called the huge impressionist show of 1874, and puts…

He had three works put in and of course none of them were appreciated. The critics just descended his work and said, "Blah, you know, whoa, what is this ugly stuff?"

There was one person who apparently, an aristocrat, who liked them enough to buy one of them, but you know, in the case of many of these artists, and he’s not the only one, you can’t get too upset about being rejected because otherwise you just give it up, you know, and you go home and you become a banker. I mean, you know, that kind of thing.

But what did happen was that he started living with Hortense and basically they stayed together for the rest of his life. She outlived him by a lot. He didn’t tell his family. And the irony of that is that his parents did exactly the same thing because he was born out of wedlock, but, you know, in this very conservative family, his parents got married well after he was born, but his father by this time was, you know, this upper middle class banker, and God help me, you know, I can’t have a son who has an out of wedlock child.

But what happened was, his son, Paul Junior was born in 1872 and they started living together and it wasn’t until several years later, that his, it was first his mother, that discovered that not only was he living with someone, but he had a child. And then basically told the father, who said okay, because by this point, he was actually starving because he was getting this tiny little stipend for one person and he was supporting a whole family in this apparently very funky little place that they were living in in Montmartre at the time.

And so his father accepted the idea that he actually had a family and increased his money, not to make him wealthy at all, but enough so that they weren’t starving to death.

[00:23:43] Annie: He was an only child himself, right?

[00:23:46] Elyse: No. He- well he was the first.

[00:23:47] Annie: Ah, okay.

[00:23:48] Elyse: He was the first, and then he had two sisters, one who was born, I think, two or three years after him, and then who was born, like, eight years or something later. And he stayed very close to one of his sisters, and one of them, apparently couldn’t stand Hortense, so that was part of what happened was that when he decided…

Always drawn to Aix

[00:24:06] Elyse: The problem with Cezanne was that he could never stay away very long from Aix. He was so attached to the environment there, to the light, to everything that he could see.

So basically what happened was, in spite of the fact that he was very attached to this group of friends, Pissarro, Renoir and company in Paris, and even though he was living with Hortense, he basically decided that he was going to spend winters in Paris, which is kind of ironic as far as I’m concerned, but he would spend winters in Paris and summers down in Aix, and that’s what he did.

And since she apparently was not particularly fond of the south, for whatever reasons, he had an apartment that she lived in with their son in Paris, and occasionally she would go down south, but most of the time, basically for the rest of their lives, they spent about a half a year together. He would go back and forth sometimes.

But she was there always for him, and they say that because he was a grumpy, kind of solitary person, there were two or three people who could deal with him. Zola could deal with him, Pissarro could deal with him, you know, a couple of others could deal with him. But apparently, she was the only one who could calm him down, so that even when their relationship was no longer what we could call an amorous relationship, you know, he was kind of like, "Oh, you know, she’s still there," kind of thing, he always relied on her because she knew how to talk to him, how to soothe him. And later on, when he was 50, which takes us to what? ’89. 1889. He discovered he had diabetes.

He was already in not great health. He didn’t drink, so he, I don’t know, I mean it just was one of those things, but he developed a very bad case of diabetes, and so he had more and more days when he wasn’t feeling well, and she was really the only person that could help him.

So she, she was very important in his life, which is not surprising, in that case, not surprising that he did over a lifetime that many paintings of her, you know? She was there for him, in a sense, it’s terrible to say it, but she was like a piece of furniture he relied on, you know? I mean, she was always there for him one way or the other. (Mid-roll ad spot)

Cézanne’s Later Years and Legacy

[00:26:23] Elyse: So of course by the time he got to be in his late 50s, people were starting to notice his work, talk about his work. He wasn’t considered to be an impressionist artist. It’s always terrible when people want to put a label on you, you know, say, "This is the kind of work you do. This is what you do." He alternated between the still life work and doing outdoor work, and then of course he did these other pieces as well.

And it was the money that his father made from being a banker that enabled the family to buy this estate called The Jas du Bouffan, which is this magnificent, you know, typical, Provencal house on this huge estate, and when he wanted to go south, he stayed there. He stayed in the house with his family, but occasionally, he wanted Hortense and his son to come south. And since the family couldn’t stand her, and she didn’t like the family, he wound up buying an apartment in Aix-en-Provence, and so, it was one of these complicated people, you know?

It was not like Monet who loved his wife and had people over for dinner all the time, you know? This was the kind of thing where it was like, Hortense and the child were on one piece of land. The family was on another, and that’s the way it stayed pretty much for many, many years in his life.

And it was starting really in his 50s that people started buying his work. He apparently also, it’s interesting, he was very upset, and I can understand why, and of course that’s true today, when he discovered that a couple of dealers and collectors started to buy his work.

Now I, the equivalent in terms of money today, I have no idea, but let’s say they were buying it for the equivalent of today maybe 2,000 Euros and reselling it for 20, and he discovered that there was a lot of that kind of artistic speculation going on, which made him very resentful and very upset.

But at the same time, he had two or three art critics who started to say that his work was visionary. A lot of people didn’t understand it, and of course part of what that is, if you look at his landscape painting, and I have a postcard in front of me right here on the wall, this is one of the watercolors he did, Mont Sainte-Victoire. One of the things that happened was that, I don’t know if this was a conscious kind of choice or not. It’s almost impossible to know when an artist works like this.

He started doing work, particularly with his landscape work, that basically broke down the forms of what he was seeing. And he either worked from the house, the Jas du Bouffan, or he worked from a tiny little hut in the middle of a quarry. The quarry is called Bibémus, and this is apparently another place that is going to open up this summer that is going to be made into a site that you can go and visit, to see. Because it was from this particular site that he did the most of his work, painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire.

But he said that he wanted to use light to show the forms, and he was obsessed by the forms more than anything else.

He said, this is a quote from him, he said he wanted to treat nature by analyzing its forms, the cylinders, the spheres, the cones, the boxes, and he wanted to use color as a way of showing the vibration of the forms in the light.

And this was basically his quest, he had what really was called by a critic in 1889, a new vision of space and color. So if you take a look at a lot of the landscapes, which is not the case of the portraits and the still life paintings, what you see is as he goes towards the last few years of his life, the works basically start to disintegrate in the sense that you have a landscape that’s recognizable as a landscape, but you see it in terms of the sides, the facades of the trees, the houses, and everything.

And this, of course, became one of the reasons why the work that came afterwards in the early 20th century was inspired by his work, because it was a very modern, very analytical approach to painting. As opposed to the impressionists who were really trying to just show natural light and natural color.

So, this is basically what happened. In 1899, when he was 60, a very famous collector named Ambroise Vollard, who’s very famous in terms of the whole world of impressionist and post-impressionist artists, had already bought a few of his works, and he put a reserve, I guess that’s the way of, I don’t know what other term to put on it.

He basically said to him, "Whatever you don’t sell by the time you die, I’m buying it." So it was like he put a kind of reserve thing on it, and of course, can imagine the amount of money he made off of that afterwards, after Cezanne actually died. From 1899 to when he died in 1909, he lived almost all the time in Aix. He basically gave up on Paris. Paris was never a place he really liked. He went to Paris because that’s where the art was, that’s where the collectors were, that’s where his friends were. Zola spent most of his time, and he really gave up on it because he was not that interested in being there and his obsession at the end of his life was exclusively painting the landscape and Mont Sainte Victoire.

In 1903, both Zola and Pissarro died, interestingly enough, and apparently it devastated him. It was the two people that were the closest to him his entire life. He said that Pissarro was like a father to him, and of course, Zola was the only true close friend he had his entire life. And by the way, I don’t know, it would be interesting to know whether Zola had any of his work. I have no idea. I don’t know if there’s a way of finding out, you know?

[00:32:09] Annie: Whether Zola what?

[00:32:11] Elyse: Whether he had any of his paintings, you know?

[00:32:13] Annie: Oh.

[00:32:14] Elyse: You know, whether he was given some of his paintings or bought them. It would be interesting to find out.

Cezanne dies in 1906

[00:32:18] Elyse: But by this time, he was living in the little house that we all know of as the studio that he has in Aix, and he was sick, and he was really not well because of the diabetes and everything else. He had enormous migraines. Apparently, for years and years he had terrible migraines, and his son took very good care of him as well.

His son, who, after he died, basically opened up a gallery, and took care of his heritage. And then in 1906, he was out painting Mont Sainte Victoire and he was at this little quarry Bibémus, got caught in a huge storm, and apparently he fainted. He had what they call a malaise, but apparently he was unconscious in the rain for hours until they found him. And they wheeled him back to his house. I have no idea where his wife, Hortense, was. By that time, by the way, they had gotten married in 1889.

They’d actually legally gotten married, and his wife and his son had been a good part of his inheritance. He was not in good health at all and they told him to stay in bed but he refused, and the next day he went to his studio to paint and then he fainted again, and then it turned out that he had caught pneumonia, and one week later he died.

 Cezanne is proclaimed visionary and the precursor of everything modern and new

[00:33:29] Elyse: So he died in 1906, at the age of 67. And of course, the irony of ironies, is that immediately he was proclaimed to be a visionary and the precursor of everything modern and new.

By this time, Picasso was already painting and he was inspired specifically by the work he did on landscape, and a whole bunch of other artists, the cubists, the fauves, all of these movements that came at that time, decided that Cezanne was their hero.

And in 1920, to me this is the kind of bitter irony of things, in 1920, so he died in 1906, in 1920, Cezanne’s work was the work that was representing France at the Venice Biennale.

This is, so this is 14 years after his death and they don’t usually do posthumous artists in the Venice Biennale, you know. But by the 1920, his work recognized as being the work of a visionary, of a genius, and of course it followed suit for just about every other group that followed into the 20th century.

Russian Artists inspired by Cezanne

[00:34:35] Elyse: And something I didn’t know, he inspired a lot of Russian artists. And I went online to see where a lot of the collection is, because of course we know about Orsay and we know about the work in a lot of the places like the Metropolitan in New York or the Barnes collection which is in Philadelphia, but guess which country has the most work by Cezanne? It’s Russia.

[00:34:59] Annie: Right, that’s…

[00:35:01] Elyse: Pretty amazing when you think about it. I mean, it just, you know, really. So, of course, he’s the quintessential artist who was not understood most of his life, but who had this vision that basically inspired so many other artists after him.

And I was trying to figure out yesterday after going through all of this and reading all of this stuff and looking at my books, which are the works that I like the most. It’s kind of interesting because his work is not light.

It’s not happy work. There’s nothing happy, really, about his painting. You know, a lot of the impressionists, their work is very happy to look at. Well, of course I love the apples. I love still life work, so I find the apples intriguing. But I think the work I like the most is the portraits, you know. And if you look at the portraits of his wife, he painted her over, and over, and over again. Basically it’s almost the same pose, you know, she’s in this long dress and sitting in this chair. But the variation of colors, textures, and the density of the color are just absolutely amazing to see, you know. So, I don’t know, if I could draw you 45 times, Annie, I don’t know how different the drawings would look, you know?

[00:36:12] Annie: You would not draw me 45 times because I don’t have that kind of patience, sweetheart. I would have told him to get lost a long time before he had the chance to paint me once. I don’t sit still that long. Oh my goodness, can you imagine?

Sitting still for hours?

[00:36:32] Elyse: Hours. Hours.

[00:36:33] Annie: Because when I was looking at kind of a lot of his paintings, what it looked like to me was that he had painted a lot of men as a matter of fact, because-

… there are painters like Degas they only ever painted women.

You know, dancers, whatever. There were lots of painters who painted women typically, and he tends to paint mostly men, I think, except for his wife, who was very, very patient.

[00:36:55] Elyse: Except for his wife.

[00:36:56] Annie: Bless her heart. Perhaps he didn’t want to pay a lot of money for people to pose?

[00:37:01] Elyse: I don’t know.

[00:37:02] Annie: You know. He could have worked from photography as a matter of fact. If, I mean, he could have taken a shot of the peoples playing cards or whatever, and worked from a photo.

[00:37:17] Elyse: That’s true. That’s true, but he was not like Seurat, the pointillist who came afterwards who basically did in fact work from photography. He was still interested in direct observation between the human eye and what he could see. But, what is interesting– and you are right, I mean, he painted his son, he painted his friends, he painted Ambroise Vollard many times, he painted…

He used his wife because she was… she was there, you know, and she was a good model. But I think in all the cases, the person is the excuse for making the painting that is about shape and color and light, basically, you know?

[00:37:52] Annie: Right. And clearly, he was obsessed with some themes, because he painted Sainte-Victoire so many times. And he was not the only painter who did this.

[00:38:02] Elyse: No. Matisse, of course, was very inspired by him, Picasso and Matisse. I have a, some here. So he did… What they know of is that there were 900 paintings left, including those in private collections, when he died. That’s a huge number. That’s an enormous amount. And 400 watercolors. He did lots and lots of watercolors. They’re absolutely beautiful. They’re just wonderful. 80 portraits, 45 or 46 of his wife that are known, 200 still life paintings, and 90 or more paintings in oil of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and then the equivalent amount in watercolor as well.

So these were, of course, his obsessive subjects. But he did produce a huge amount of work. And, of course, now when you know that paintings sell for sums that are absolutely obscene, you know, I mean, I live for art in a way, but $250 million for a painting, and there are others that have been sold for prices like that, I mean, oh my God, it just… you know, it’s beyond kind of comprehension in some way.

But he is really considered to be one of the… or the father of modern art, partly because he analyzed, even intentionally or not, he analyzed what he was looking at in a way that was breaking it down. And it’s true, he could have used photography, but apparently, he did not, you know? He chose not to.

[00:39:31] Annie: Right. Right. So he was, in a way, he was like the charniere, how do you say that?

[00:39:35] Elyse: Oh, I don’t know how you say that. He was the link.

[00:39:38] Annie: Yeah.

[00:39:38] Elyse: He was the link, really.

[00:39:40] Annie: Between the impressionists and modernism.

[00:39:42] Elyse: That’s right.

[00:39:44] Annie: Right? So,

he’s in between. But he’s still a lot in the Orsay Museum.

[00:39:49] Elyse: Yes, because he’s part of what is the category, if you want to call it that, of post-impressionist, okay? Which of course includes Seurat and the people who did all these little dots, you know?

[00:39:59] Annie: I don’t think he did dots.

He did shapes. He painted the shape, gave it volume by using different hints of color and things? I don’t know. I-

[00:40:10] Elyse: Exactly. Exactly.

And then in his oil and in his watercolors, it’s even more so because they’re… What’s nice about them, and I happen to love watercolor painting in general, but there’s a lot of open, airy space. So you can see the angles, the shapes of the buildings, the trees, the Mont Saint-Michel itself, you know, he breaks it down. You really see the direct link between him and what Picasso and a couple of other artists developed as cubism. They just went in a direction that I find basically not particularly interesting because it became so just analytical because, Cezanne’s work is beautiful. I mean, that’s the other thing. It’s like, there’s beauty in all this painting, you know?

[00:40:51] Annie: Yeah. It’s very beautiful. It’s very easy to look at.

And, okay, one detail about his personality that I found interesting is that he didn’t like to be touched.

[00:41:00] Elyse: Uh-huh.

[00:41:01] Annie: There are a lot of people like that, really.

[00:41:03] Elyse:

[00:41:03] Annie: Apparently as he got older, it got worse.

And his housekeeper, he had asked her to be very careful not… never to touch him, and he didn’t even want her coat or her dress to touch him in any way. Isn’t that weird?

[00:41:20] Elyse: That’s weird. That’s weird. That’s weird.

[00:41:24] Annie: So, but I mean, that’s just a quirky personality trait that can get worse over time, you know?

But it makes more… It makes him more human.

[00:41:33] Elyse: You know, I mean, he wasn’t a phallocrat like Picasso, you know? I mean, there’s lots of people who say, "I don’t want to look at Picasso’s work because of his attitude towards women."

Well, I’m not… I don’t believe that that’s the right attitude, but that’s just me personally. But Cezanne was just this grumpy, solitary human who basically had two or three people that were important to him, and that was it, you know? And obviously being sick, physically ill

didn’t help, you know?

[00:42:00] Annie: Treating type 2 diabetes today is complicated. I can’t imagine what it must have been like back then.

[00:42:06] Elyse:

[00:42:06] Annie: It must have wreaked havoc on all his organs, you know, even if he was super careful, they didn’t have the meds that we have today to deal with it.

[00:42:16] Elyse: No.

And that was… Like, living to 66 when you have type 2 diabetes, back then, must have been very difficult. It’s not an easy disease.

[00:42:27] Elyse: No.

[00:42:28] Annie: Whether it’s type 1 or type 2. I mean, type 1, he would have been dead.

[00:42:31] Elyse: He would have been dead.

[00:42:32] Annie: Yeah.

[00:42:32] Elyse: There’s a photograph of him taken by his son, probably just a few months before he died. You know, today someone who’s 66 doesn’t look that old. He was this… He looked so old, with this huge white beard, and with a cane. Okay, so he still produced a huge amount of work. It’s absolutely remarkable, you know?

[00:42:52] Annie:

[00:42:52] Elyse: I would love to have some apples in front of me right now, you know? I’m just… You know.

[00:42:57] Annie: Yes, yes.

[00:42:58] Elyse: I can’t wait to go back.

[00:42:59] Annie: Yeah. But he also, he did peaches and he also did cherries.

[00:43:04] Elyse: Yes.

[00:43:05] Annie: He liked fruit.

[00:43:06] Elyse: He liked fruit. He liked the forms of fruit, you know?

[00:43:09] Annie: But no, no oranges. I don’t remember seeing oranges or clementines or things.

[00:43:15] Elyse: Oh, I don’t know.

[00:43:16] Annie: Which is weird because they grow easily in that part of the country.

[00:43:19] Elyse: That’s true.

But whatever.

[00:43:21] Annie: You like the fruits you like. It’s okay.

Conclusion

[00:43:23] Elyse: I think I’m going to wait till September to go, because I don’t want to go in July and August with a huge crush, but I am planning on spending two days there with my friend from Marseille, and visiting everything again, because I go there every single year, and kind of… this kind of pilgrimage. But this time, it’s going to be really fun to go out and see all these other places that he sat in and look at Mont Sainte-Victoire the same way he did.

[00:43:51] Annie: Right, and I’m in Paris as we record this, and so I will try to go to the Orsay. Hopefully not all his work is already packed up and sitting in Aix. Hopefully, there’s still quite a bit in the Orsay. We’ll see. I’ll try it.

[00:44:04] Elyse: Oh, sure. I’m sure there will be. I don’t think they’re going to get too many paintings coming out of Russia, but that’s another whole story, you know, so…

[00:44:09] Annie: Yes. Thank you so much, Elyse.

[00:44:13] Elyse: You’re welcome, Annie.

[00:44:14] Annie: Au revoir.

[00:44:14] Elyse: Au revoir.

Thank you, patrons

[00:44:22] Annie: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patrons get several exclusive rewards for doing so. You can see them at patreon.com/joinus.

And a special shout-out this week to my new Join Us in France champion, Danielle Binenki. Would you join her too? You can do it for as, as little as $3 a month, but if you can afford it, I would love to have you pledge more so you can have access to more of the rewards.

And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/elysart.

Reviews

[00:45:03] Annie: I’m going to read you a couple of reviews that people left of my VoiceMap tours.

Somebody left this review of my Montmartre tour this week: "Really nice tour, well-produced, and good stories to make it come alive."

And a longer one about my Marais tour, someone anonymous again wrote: "I remember our first trip to Paris which was in 2002. Except for the cool room at the Paris Hilton with a great view of the Eiffel Tower at night that we were fortunate enough to be upgraded to, I thought of Paris as just another big city. How wrong I was! We have been back several times since then, and I am so into the history of Paris, and as well as France. I find it totally fascinating. We will be there in April, and we will be staying in the Marais area for the second time.

If only I had known of your walking tours on past trips. I’ve already listened to your VoiceMap two or three times, and I want to listen to it again and again. I can hardly wait to get there. We’re also going to other cities, towns in France, and I’ll also be looking for other VoiceMap tours. I’m so happy to have found this. They are better than private tours that cost 10 or 20 times more."

Well, thank you very much, Anonymous. Yes, I do agree that a lot of VoiceMap tours are better than in-person tours.

Remember that podcast listeners get a big discount for buying these tours from my website,and there’s my new baby called Gothic Paris as well. And by Gothic, I mean the second Gothic cathedral built in the world, Notre Dame.

Now, if you buy directly from me, it’s a manual process will take, you know, few hours. If you need it immediately, buy from the VoiceMap app. And if you want to read more reviews of these tours, go to joinusinfrance.com/vmr. That stands for VoiceMap Reviews.

If you’re planning a trip to France and you need personalized advice, hire me as your itinerary consultant. I can tell a lot of you are going to be visiting France soon because this service is very, very busy. You may not find a time slot to talk to me as soon as you would like, so don’t put it off if it’s your intention to do this. Ready to start? Visit joinusinfrance.com/boutique and follow the email instructions.

 How are the French feeling about American tourists these days?

[00:47:27] Annie: All right, someone recently wrote to me with this question, "How are the French feeling about American tourists these days?"

She and her husband are planning a trip to Paris and the Loire Valley, and they are feeling a little bit nervous about how they might be received.

And I get it. I’ve been hearing this kind of concern more often lately, but honestly, I really don’t think you have too much to worry about. These feelings come and go. They’re cyclical.

If you’ve been paying attention for a while, you remember the whole freedom fries during the Bush years. That was a weird moment and a good example of how political tensions can bubble up, but they rarely have much impact on how regular people treat one another.

The truth is, French people are generally very good at separating the people from the politics. That applies to our own leaders as well, maybe especially so.

In France, we’re kind of known for electing someone, and then three weeks later, acting like we never liked him at all in the first place. So if you’re an American planning a visit, don’t let politics stop you, come if France is your happy place. The vast majority of French people will welcome you warmly, especially if you make a little effort with the language and basic politeness. You know, don’t forget your Merci or Bonjour or your S’il te plaît, especially the Bonjour though.

And honestly, the French are far more interested in how you take your coffee or that wine you’re drinking, than who your president is right now. So relax, enjoy, don’t overthink it. You’re very welcome here.

My thanks to podcast editors Anne and Christian Cotovan, who produced the transcripts. Next week on the podcast, an episode with Francois Senechal, the friendly guide from Provence, who is a return guest on the podcast, who will tell us about his other love, Corsica.

We haven’t talked about Corsica all that much, and it’s a part of France that is absolutely beautiful. He’ll help us discover hidden gems, great stories, and the man talks with a smile in his voice. He’s such a pleasure to talk to.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time, so we can look around France together. Au revoir.

Copyright

[00:49:52] Annie: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent, and Copyright 2025 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.

Subscribe to the Podcast

Apple Google Spotify RSS

Support the Show

Tip Your Guides Extras Patreon Audio Tours

Read more about this transcript

Episode Page 

Categories: French Culture, Provence