Paul Cézanne’s Hometown of Aix-en-Provence Is Finally Celebrating Its Most Famous Native Son
This summer, the artist’s historic home and studio are opening to the public alongside a massive retrospective exhibition at the museum that once refused his works
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Before his death, Paul Cézanne offered 100 of his paintings to the art museum in Aix-en-Provence, the city in southern France where he was born and lived for more than 40 years.
Despite hosting the art school where Cézanne took evening courses, the Musée Granet refused. “In my lifetime, no Cézanne will enter,” its curator, Henri Pontier, vowed, according to the New York Times’ Alexis Steinman.
The Musée Granet kept Pontier’s promise until long after his death in 1926. When Bruno Ely arrived as a newly minted deputy director at the museum in the 1980s, Aix was still known as “the town without Cézanne,” he tells the Art Newspaper’s Dale Berning Sawa.
Although the Musée Granet finally acquired its first Cézanne in 1984, Aix has long had a shaky relationship with its most famous native son, who shocked the art world—and his hometown—with his bold departure from the hazy pleasantries of Impressionism.
Now under the stewardship of Ely, the Musée Granet is spearheading Cézanne 2025, a city-wide embrace of the painter, including a major retrospective of his works and the reopening of his newly renovated home and studio.
“Cézanne 2025 will ensure the artist, forever linked to his hometown of Aix-en-Provence, is remembered as a ‘worthy interpreter of the riches’ of this region—a goal the artist pursued throughout his life,” Sophie Joissains, the town’s mayor, says in a statement.
Something of an attempt to right Pontier’s stubborn refusal, “Cézanne at Jas de Bouffan,” the exhibition on view at the Musée Granet from June 28 to October 12, assembles more than 130 paintings, drawings and watercolors from 75 global institutions.
The exhibition takes its name from the neighborhood west of Aix’s historic city center where Cézanne’s banker father purchased a manor house in 1859.
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The house, known as the Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, became an inspiration for the young painter, who was just a 20-year-old law student at the time. He used the ground floor as a studio, creating dozens of oil paintings and watercolors at the house. He even painted murals directly onto the living room walls. One, now known as Entrée du port, was discovered beneath layers of wallpaper and plaster last year.
As part of Cézanne 2025, the house is now open to the public. Entrée du port is preserved, and his other murals are projected onto the living room walls. His depictions of the house and its residents—including House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan, The Artist's Father, Reading “L’Événement” and The Card Players, which was modeled on local farm hands—are on view as part of the exhibition.
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Other exhibition highlights include several paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, a limestone mountain ridge that hangs over Aix and appears more than 80 times in Cézanne’s oeuvre.
So important was this landmark to Cézanne that years after he left his family home, he built a new studio known as the Atelier des Lauves north of the city center with commanding views of the mountain.
Even decades after his death, the mountain still loomed large for Cézanne’s followers. In 1958, Pablo Picasso is said to have told his art dealer friend Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler that he had “bought the Sainte-Victoire.” When Kahnweiler asked which one, referring to the dozens of paintings Cézanne created during his time in Aix, Picasso replied, “the original.” He had bought Château de Vauvenargues, a grand house on the side of the mountain where he would later be buried.
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This summer, the Atelier des Lauves will be open to the public, offering visitors a chance to see Cézanne’s last studio where he worked beneath its tall windows from 1902 until his death in 1906.
Taken alongside the massive exhibition, Cézanne’s refurbished home and studio demonstrate the city’s newfound willingness to acknowledge that “Aix was Cézanne’s center of gravity,” Ely tells the Art Newspaper.
As Cézanne himself once said, “When I was in Aix, I thought I’d be better off somewhere else. Now I’m here, I miss Aix. When you’re born there, it’s hopeless. Nothing else is good enough.”
“Cézanne at Jas de Bouffan” will be on view at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France, from June 28 to October 12, 2025.
