Cezanne country

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AIX-EN -PROVENCE, France -- "We call her 'the sleeping beauty,'" said the representative ofthelocal tourist bureau. She is indeed a beauty: Aix-en-Provence, the lovely town that the Industrial Revolution forgot. Her 17th- and 18th-century charm remains sleepily and happily intact.

We came to sample her pleasures in anticipation of the Year of Paul Cezanne, which begins tomorrow in observance of the centenary of the death of the great painter in Aix, where he was born, worked and died.

Provence is ready to celebrate throughout 2006. The piece de resistance will be a major exhibition of Cezanne's work, which will open June 9 in Aix's newly renovated Musee Granet.

The exhibition, "Cezanne in Provence," is co-sponsored by the National Gallery of Art, so for 100 days, Jan. 29 through May 7, Washingtonians first can enjoy about 120 of Cezanne's portraits, still lifes, landscapes and watercolors; delight in the colors, light and shadow of the artist's creativity; and ponder his unique vision, which served as the cornerstone of modern art.

This is the first exhibition to explore the artist's complex emotional ties to his birthplace through landscapes, portraits of friends and family and the series of paintings known as "the Bathers."

Visitors are not here in Aix for long before they understand and relish Cezanne's inspiration. Provence is a land of sunshine and warm, golden stone towns; of villages perched precariously on hilltops; of olive groves and fields of lavender; of garlic-scented food and hearty wines. The cold mistral blows through from the north, and occasionally the warm sirocco from the Sahara crosses the Mediterranean from the south. Exquisite.

Paul Cezanne was born in Aix on Jan. 19, 1839. His father, Louis-Auguste, who was not married to Paul's mother at the time of the future painter's birth, presided over a hat shop on the Cours Mirabeau, Aix's finest street. Louis-Auguste later became a successful banker and purchased one of the town's elegant mansions.

Cezanne was a mediocre student, not very motivated to become a lawyer, as his father wished. He was interested only in painting, and he studied in the art school in Aix. He followed his friend and classmate Emile Zola to Paris. Zola's father had come to Aix to build a dam not far away.

In Paris, Cezanne studied the works of old masters such as Veronese, Tintoretto and Rubens. Influenced by Camille Pisarro, one of his contemporaries, Cezanne learned to use a lighter range of colors and to paint outdoors. He had little success in Paris and returned to Provence.

Despite intermittent trips to Paris, the artist lived and worked most of his life in Provence -- at Jas de Bouffan, his father's country house; in Estaque, a seaside village near Marseille; in Gardanne, a town nine miles from Aix, which has dedicated a pathway dotted with reproductions of his paintings to his memory; at the Chateau Noir estate, where he rented two rooms to store his paints and canvases while he worked in the surrounding hills; in Bibemus, where the stone used to build Aix was quarried and Cezanne rented a cottage to paint and exhibit his work; in Le Tholonet, the starting point for visiting the dam built by Zola and the Roman aqueduct behind the castle of Tholonet; and in Aix itself.