Cezanne and the Magic Mountain
Source: www.washingtonpost.com. Posted on 30 April 2006.
It was a blustery Saturday afternoon on the cusp of spring in Le Tholonet, France, and we were spending it as a family of art-loving Americans are expected to in this part of the world -- tromping around the hills just east of Aix-en-Provence and soaking up the landscapes painted lovingly over and over by Paul Cezanne.
We walked down narrow country roads, climbed washed-out rocky footpaths and arrived on a ridge with a magnificent view overlooking the countryside and Cezanne's favorite subject -- Mont Sainte-Victoire, one of the world's most famous masses of limestone. Obscured even as it was by gray cloud cover, the mountain was impressive. Because of the way it dominates the land around it, Sainte-Victoire looks much grander than its 3,300 feet of elevation. And today it resembled a mammoth glacier in the fog.
