Finding a muse in mountains and chestnut trees
Source: www.nytimes.com. Posted on 31 January 2006.
Were it not that I am deeply in love with the landscape of my country, I should not be here.' When Paul Cézanne wrote those words in 1896, a decade before his death, they stated the obvious.
By then Cézanne, 57, had spent much of his adult life moving like an itinerant painter through the southern French region of Provence, the object of his affections. He had, of course, been to Paris and put in his time at the Louvre; he had worked beside Camille Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers in the mid-1870's, absorbing the basics of Impressionism's reasonable, systematic technique.
But he never strayed for long from the area around Aix-en-Provence, where he was born in 1839 and over his father's objections began to be a painter.
