Celebrate a hundred years in Provence
Source: www.timesonline.co.uk. Posted on 29 April 2006.
Standing beside a limestone quarry, gazing over a vista of green and gold to a geometrical mountain ridge, you get the uncanny feeling of having intruded into a 19th-century painting. That may be because you have, since this is the landscape claimed as his own by one of France's most illustrious painters.
Great artists are rarely strangers to obsession and Paul Cézanne was no exception. In the artist's later years he developed a mania for painting the profile of Mont Sainte-Victoire above the village of Le Tholonet just outside Aix-en-Provence. The scene inspired some of Cézanne's greatest works. Picasso famously gloated smugly to his agent about snapping up Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire masterpiece. 'Which one?' the agent replied laconically.
