Musée Granet reunites the master with his family home in summer’s most ambitious exhibition
The Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) had something enviable that escaped many of his fellow artists: solid opportunities in Paris. Yet, he maintained a magnetic bond with Provence, drawn repeatedly to the luminous landscapes and golden stone of his native Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne’s artistic soul remained tethered to the familiar terrain of his childhood. As he wrote to his friend Philippe Solari: “When you’re born there, it’s hopeless – nothing else is good enough.”
In a long overdue sequel to the legendary 2006 Cézanne retrospective which drew over 450,000 visitors, the Musée Granet 2025 grand summer exhibition presents Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan, a landmark exhibition grounded in this enduring attachment to place. Through nearly 130 works drawn from prestigious international collections, the show reunites the painter with the family bastide where he lived for four decades. The event coincides with the phased reopening of the Jas de Bouffan estate itself, offering visitors a rare convergence of artworks and the physical environment in which they were created.
As visitors start their experience by stepping in the intimacy of the artist’s beloved family home, they are guided by spatial layout rather than chronology. One of the masterpieces here is the iconic Card Players, a glimpse into everyday life with estate workers as models.
8_1_FWN 684 Paul Cezanne, Les Joueurs de cartes, 1893-1896 Huile sur toile, 47 x 56,5 cm France, Paris, musée d’Orsay, legs Isaac de Camondo, 1911 © GrandPalaisRmn (musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
In the artist’s second floor studio, luminous still lifes hang alongside those haunting self-portraits that trace his transformation from provincial art student to modernist pioneer.
The reconstructed Grand Salon displays the audacious wall panels Cézanne painted directly onto plaster as a young man, including fragments of a newly discovered work identified in 2023 during restoration. Rather than presenting these as developmental stages, the curation reveals how Cézanne returned repeatedly to the same subjects, locations, and formal problems throughout his career.
The tour continues at the Musée Granet. One of the exhibition’s highlights is the maestro’s magnificent Maison et ferme du Jas de Bouffan, on loan from Prague’s National Gallery, which shows the manor bathed in golden light with its distinctive red roof against emerald fields. The composition demonstrates Cézanne’s mature ability to reconcile observed reality with formal structure, transforming familiar architecture into a form both specific and universal. The peasant portraits dignify agricultural workers with the gravitas traditionally reserved for aristocrats, while the experimental bather compositions reveal how classical themes could be reinvented through direct engagement with Mediterranean light and landscape.
8_147_FWN 528 Paul Cezanne, Homme aux bras croisés, vers 1899 Huile sur toile, 92 x 72,7 cm États-Unis, New York (NY), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
7_203_FWN 924 Paul Cezanne, Baigneurs au repos, vers 1875-1876 Huile sur toile, 35,2 x 46 cm Suisse, Ville de Genève, musée d’Art et d’Histoire, dépôt de la Fondation Jean-Louis Prevost, 1985 © Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, photographe : Bettina Jacot-Descombes
The Jas de Bouffan period encompasses Cézanne’s most prolific years, from his academic training in the 1860s through his mature synthesis of Impressionist light with architectural structure. Here he developed the systematic brushwork and geometric simplification that would influence Picasso, Braque, and generations of modern artists. The estate’s fourteen hectares of vineyards and orchards provided not mere motifs but laboratory conditions: the allée of chestnut trees, the ornamental basin, the farm buildings, and beyond the property walls, views toward Mont Sainte-Victoire that became his obsession. Repetition enabled experimentation; familiarity freed him to pursue formal innovation without narrative distraction. The visitor intuits how the painter’s Provençal focus enabled rather than limited his revolutionary achievements.
Born in 1839 to a successful banker father, Cézanne embodied the contradictions of a conservative man pursuing radical artistic vision. His personality oscillated between fierce independence and deep emotional attachment to home, between Parisian ambitions and provincial loyalties. Physically robust yet progressively reclusive, he possessed the temperament of a gentle revolutionary who dismantled tradition through repeated study of familiar landscapes and domestic subjects. His correspondence reveals a man tortured by self-doubt yet driven by unshakeable conviction about his artistic mission.
4_124_FWN 446 Paul Cezanne, Autoportrait au chapeau de paille, 1878–1879 Huile sur toile, 34,9 x 28,9 cm États-Unis, New York (NY), The Museum of Modern Art, collection William S. Paley © 2025. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
The museum’s success stems from recognising that regional identity and international significance always reinforce each other. Located in the former priory of the Knights of Malta, Granet possesses architectural intimacy that transforms every exhibition into dialogue between artwork and environment.
This approach reflects Musée Granet’s distinctive curatorial philosophy, developed over two decades of landmark summer exhibitions. Unlike institutions that emphasise local heritage through celebration, Granet has consistently used its geographical advantages to pose and contextualise serious art historical questions.
Other notable summer exhibition of past years include…. The subsequent grand annual summer exhibitions at the Granet have maintained this intellectual rigour: David Hockney’s pool paintings examined how California light functioned differently from Impressionist luminosity; ancient Egyptian treasures showcased the artistic ingenuity of the great lost empire; and German Romantic painters working in Rome investigated how place shapes artistic identity across cultures and centuries.
Numerous side events accentuate the exhibition (see website and visitor booklet for details.) The timing within the broader Cézanne 2025 citywide celebration creates unprecedented opportunities for understanding artistic process through geographical immersion. As mayor Sophie Joissains states, “Cézanne 2025 is also a season and a year of ‘Cézanne at home’, a dedicated journey through Cézanne’s landmarks: the Lauves studio, the Bibémus quarries and cabin, and the Jas de Bouffan bastide”. These sites offer visitors something beyond typical museum experience: the chance to inhabit the spaces where artistic history unfolded. This convergence of place, artwork, and historical resonance reveals the deeper conditions that shaped Cézanne’s method.
“There are two things in a painter: the eye and the brain, and they need to help each other” – Paul Cézanne
VISITOR INFORMATION
Cézanne at Jas de Bouffan – Through 12 October, 2025
Open daily except on Mondays from 9 am to 7 pm (Thursday hours 12 pm to 10 pm)
Standard admission €18 / concessions available
No onsite ticket sale – Online bookings (or purchase tickets at the Aix-en-Provence Tourist Office, 300 avenue Giuseppe Verdi)
Bilingual (FR/EN) visitor booklet
English and French language guided tours available, upon reservation only
CONTACT DETAILS
Musée Granet
Place Saint Jean de Malte
13100 Aix-en-Provence
Tel: +33(0)442528832
Lead image © Ville d’Aix-en-Provence; all other images as credited
Felicitations Nat Ja for your unique way-high lighting another superb exhibition by Musée Granet, And kudos to Riviera-Buzz.