On a clear day in Provence in the 1880s, a middle-aged man with an easel and brush stood before a landscape of Mistral-swept cypresses, verdant fields and a craggy mountain. The man was Paul Cézanne, and he was attempting to capture on canvas the illusive nature of Mont Ste-Victoire. One hundred and twenty or so years later, I found myself standing on the same spot near Aix-en-Provence, and, to my surprise and delight, there was Cézanne's mythical mountain, iridescent in the afternoon sun, towering over fields of silken wheat and red poppies. There were a few more olive trees, and the red-tiled rooftops in the distance had become high-priced second homes rather than farmhouses, but the setting was clearly one I had seen before in many of Cézanne's paintings.
There is something reassuring about finding a scene that you have known in a painting; it gives not only a sense of connection with history, but also a palpable sense of relief that at least a small part of the world hasn't become a highway or shopping mall.
Few places can give this sensation like Provence, the sunny muse of many artists. The region has numerous attractions — climate, cuisine, history — but it is the sun-kissed landscapes depicted by Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and others that have always formed my mental image of Provence.
Next week, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will unveil Right under the Sun: Landscape in Provence, from Classicism to Modernism, 1750-1920. The exhibit explores the effect of Provençal landscapes and light on painters from the Romantics to the Cubists, with some 200 works by van Gogh, Cézanne, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Braque and others.
These are the sort of images that make you dream of travel, of putting yourself in the picture, of seeing whether something so lovely can really exist.
Travelling recently in Provence, I did just that, and discovered that many of the landscapes painted by these artists are still there. In some cases they survive thanks to simple historical chance; others owe their preservation to the clever restorations of local tourist boards.
Despite the occasional intrusion of plaques and souvenir shops, the essential elements of all of these paintings — the landscapes, light and colours of Provence — can still startle with their beauty and resemblance to pictures painted more than 100 years ago. The following are four landscapes featured in the Montreal exhibition that haven't changed much from when the artists painted them.
Paul Cézanne
Mont Ste-Victoire (1887-90)
Cézanne once wrote: “. . .to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.” This could be why his landscapes have the elemental quality of a fleeting sensation or happy memory.
Cézanne's greatest natural challenge was Mont Ste-Victoire, a lone 1,011-metre mountain dominating the landscape near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. He painted it more than 80 times, trying to capture the essence of what he saw.
On my first glimpse of Mont Ste-Victoire from the Moulin Cézanne — a stone mill that today houses a gallery on the route du Tholonet a few kilometres east of Aix — I could understand his fascination. The mountain really does have a peculiar face. Its endless planes of rippling grey, white and beige stone dotted with scrubby green plants were a constantly changing play of light and shadow against a brilliant blue sky.
