An art lover’s Impressionist movie trip to Provence and the Riviera
We can think about ourselves under the crystal sunshine along France’s Mediterranean coast, which vacationers may possibly quickly be equipped to stop by at the time once again. I had prepared to be there past April, and nevertheless hope to get there this tumble. But considering the fact that we’re not yet in a position to make that journey, we can soak up the radiance on-line — on museum web-sites and in video clip presentations about the many artists, Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse between them — who traveled from Paris to the Mediterranean and shaped our vision of the seductive Riviera.
A excursion to Provence and the Riviera may well start out at the western close of that stretch, in the Roman metropolis of Arles, exactly where Van Gogh initially lived soon after leaving Paris. Even though none of the primary paintings is nevertheless in Arles, there is a Van Gogh trail, with easels exhibiting his most legendary sights of that city, the place he lived for 15 months and where his exuberance propelled him to just preserve on painting — and portray.
When I followed that trail of easels a few a long time back, I started where Van Gogh himself started off, in the town square wherever his famous “Yellow House” was painted the property was bombed in Environment War II, but as you seem at the easel, you can glimpse up and however see the setting up and railroad bridge he painted powering it. As you stick to the markers in the pavement, you visit 6 other spots in which easels portray some of the most popular Van Gogh is effective, including “Starry Evening more than the Rhone” and the “Cafe la Nuit at the Position du Forum,” the glowing yellow cafe versus a brilliant night-blue sky with big stars only Van Gogh could have imagined. Right until you can physically walk the stroll in Arles, you can encounter Van Gogh’s vivid hues on YouTube, in a energetic 2019 lecture sequence from the Yale College Art Gallery by Van Gogh scholar John Walsh, who reveals virtually 50 of Van Gogh’s landscape and backyard views in and all around Arles in an hour-prolonged chat.
Van Gogh’s paintings also can transportation us to the broader area all-around Arles. He traveled south to the historical city of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue location on the Mediterranean. There he turned his swift strokes to capturing one particular of Provence’s most sensual capabilities: rows and rows of lavender receding into the distance.
10 miles northeast of Arles, on the way to Saint-Remy and the Luberon hill cities, is the asylum exactly where Van Gogh fully commited himself immediately after a breakdown. There he experienced a different artistic burst. Common views of towering, twisting cypress trees, which Van Gogh compared to Egyptian obelisks, have been amid three landscape themes he experimented with in his calendar year confined to the Saint-Paul de Mausole asylum. His cypresses stand darkish green from a good blue or glowing yellow sky. His most legendary portray, “Starry Night time,” is one particular of those people. In some cases the cypresses tower about wheat fields swaying with Van Gogh power. The artist identified a non secular power in the olive trees so dominant in Provence. “The rustle of the olive grove has some thing really mystery in it, and immensely old,” he wrote to his brother.
Browsing the asylum, I liked observing easels along the yard path, demonstrating his best-recognized landscapes, the sights mostly unchanged today. And I loved standing at his upstairs vantage point, the place I could so quickly make out the Alpilles hills that are the backdrop of most of his landscapes from that time. A lot of this is noticed in a different hour-prolonged component of the Yale sequence on YouTube, prosperous in pictures from Van Gogh’s 12 months at the asylum.
If Van Gogh journeyed from Paris to explore the shade and gentle of Provence, the other big whose operate is permanently joined to that brilliant landscape was a native of the city of Aix-en-Provence. Whilst Paul Cézanne deemed himself an Impressionist, he worked in another way, his dabs emphasizing sort as properly as colour, indicating that he wanted to create images much more “solid” than his Impressionist brethren were being attaining. Cézanne’s landscapes fill out our vision of the countryside that lies concerning Van Gogh’s stomping grounds in Arles and Saint-Remy, and the Riviera to the east of Aix.
Above quite a few a long time, up till his remaining days, Cézanne painted the beautiful Mont Sainte- Victoire, the landmark blue-gray peak jutting up previously mentioned the if not flat Provence, about 60 occasions. He climbed to a viewpoint in the vicinity of his studio to seize the mountain at various periods, in diverse lights. Browsing that studio, which has been kept significantly as it was, and then walking a brief length to the easels at his most loved viewpoint puts you correct there, to see how the gentle shifts in opposition to the rocks of the mountain.
Cézanne also painted views of the shiny blue Bay of Marseilles from the close by rocky hillside village of L’Estaque. He was an evangelist about portray the mild and landscape of the South, just as Van Gogh had been Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet traveled from Paris in 1883 and joined Cézanne there briefly. Later, Cézanne grew to become the very first to split absent from Impressionism. (Henri Matisse named Cézanne “the father of us all.”) A BBC docudrama about all the Impressionists focuses on the operate and particular life of Monet and Cézanne, who is offered as hard but broadly admired by his fellow Impressionists. You can appreciate Cézanne’s landscapes of Provence on a PBS software that was accomplished when Washington’s National Gallery of Art introduced a landmark exhibition of all those operates in 2006.
Two many years afterwards and a hundred miles east, the same rigorous gentle and color motivated Picasso, Renoir, Matisse and Raoul Dufy, among the quite a few others whose landscapes give us a watch of the good Cote d’Azur (Blue Coastline). In his pictures of the Riviera’s most preferred accumulating location, Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, Dufy confected a resort truly feel with his characteristic black skeletal outlines, included in a shiny wash of primary colours, specially shades of blue.
Matisse manufactured Great his foundation for above 40 several years, until eventually his loss of life in 1954. His property there is a museum with a big assortment of his paintings and cutouts, together with some of the recognizable objects he pictured in excess of and about. There is a documentary with hundreds of pictures of Matisse’s do the job during those years. The National Gallery of Art’s senior lecturer David Gariff recorded a 2020 lecture with sights of the Riviera by Matisse and quite a few some others, which includes Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Signac.
Matisse’s rival, Pablo Picasso, spent some write-up-Environment War II several years in the historic seafront city of Antibes, where a museum currently is committed to his yrs in that fortresslike building, a medieval bishop’s house and afterwards a castle. His most iconic portray of the Riviera — whilst undoubtedly a lot less descriptive of the watch than reflective of his thoughts — hangs in the studio where he produced it in 1946. “The Pleasure of Daily life,” a energetic portrayal of Picasso and his younger lover as mythological creatures cavorting along the shore and enjoying musical instruments, demonstrates his optimism just after Globe War II. It’s uncomplicated to share his joy when you stand on the museum’s terrace with the impossibly blue Mediterranean just before you.
Two generations just after Van Gogh heralded the South’s distinct light-weight and good colours, artists started to migrate immediately after Environment War I to the “perched villages” of the Riviera’s hills previously mentioned Great. My journey that began by walking in Van Gogh’s footwear in Arles, and looking at by means of his eyes at the asylum in Saint-Remy, ended at one particular of these villages, the medieval town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
There are two highlights. At the really peak, the hanging, fashionable Fondation Maeght museum has paintings and sculptures by most of the essential artists who worked there. Some of the sculptures are of dramatic scale, stunningly shown on the museum’s grounds. The perspective from that place to the distant sea down below is a fitting way to end an art journey that starts in Provence with the innovative function of Van Gogh and Cézanne.
And to really leading it off, check out a video clip of the famous watering gap and amazing cafe La Colombe d’Or just downhill from the Fondation Maeght. In the times when the giants of early modern-day artwork hung out there, the inn turned a gallery of their performs, which they gave in trade for space and board. A staggering number of their paintings nevertheless line the partitions. Diners sit among the the Picassos and Matisses and toast the shade and gentle that was their inspiration.
Nathan is a writer dependent in Bethesda, Md.
