Cézanne Summer!
As the Cézanne 2025 festival kicks off in Aix-en-Provence, let's look back on the artist's most favorite place in the world, and the summers he spent roaming its countryside.
The house was built in the fading embers of the ancien régime, under the watchful eye of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Bordered by trees and lush gardens, the structure was in every sense a bastide: a Provençal manor that traded the ostentation of Rococo for something more laid back. Rows of symmetrical windows were adorned with quaint shutters, and the foliage enveloped the house in green. The antithesis of stuffy. This was the countryside—a place to kick off one’s shoes and breathe in the cool, clean air.
Georges Vallon designed the Bastide du Jas de Bouffan in 1750 for a government official named Gaspard Truphème, and it remained in his family for generations. On the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, the bastide endured through revolutions, monarchies, and empires, until Truphème’s descendants decided to sell the estate to a Provençal banker in 1859.