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Key figures

Origin and history

Paul Cézanne's workshop in Aix-en-Provence was built between 1901 and 1902 on a plot of 7,000 m2 north of the city, in the Lauves district. This place became the heart of his creation from 1902 until his death in 1906. Cézanne worked there every morning, surrounded by familiar objects and Provencal landscapes that nourished his inspiration, including his famous still lifes and his studies on Mount Sainte-Victoire, which he painted almost 80 times.

The workshop was designed to meet the specific needs of the painter, with a large bay window facing north to capture a constant and diffuse light, essential to his work on colours and volumes. Cézanne developed a rigorous method, based on the geometric observation of nature and the decomposition of the forms into cylinders, spheres and cones. His letters, like the one addressed to Émile Bernard in 1904, reveal his quest for "harmony parallel to nature", where perspective and colour unite to transcend reality.

When he died in 1906, the workshop remained intact, preserving the painter's personal objects, brushes, pallets and even his clothes stained with paint. Transformed into a museum in 1954, it now offers a unique testimony of Cézanne's creative universe. The site, classified as a historical monument, allows to understand the evolution of its art, between revisited classicism and radical modernity, which influenced movements such as cubism and expressionism.

The workshop is inseparable from the Provencal region, where Cézanne drew inspiration, from Bibémus quarries to the landscapes of the Sainte-Victoire mountain. These places, whether on foot or by car on horseback, became recurrent motifs of his work. His attachment to Aix-en-Provence, where he was born and died, is reflected in his letters and choices of life, as his refusal to leave the Midi permanently despite his Parisian stays.

The posterity of the workshop extends far beyond the death of Cezanne. Artists such as Picasso or Matisse drew a major inspiration, while writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke or philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty analyzed his revolutionary approach to perception. Today, the workshop of the Lauves, with its walls covered with canvases and objects arranged as in the time of the painter, remains a place of pilgrimage for art lovers from all over the world.

The building itself, sober and functional, reflects Cézanne's personality: a discreet, methodical man obsessed with his art until his last days. Its interior design, with its shelves filled with trinkets and its canvases hanging from the walls, bears witness to a work space organized for an uninterrupted creation. Visitors can still see the famous still life with apples, symbol of his aesthetic quest, or the preparatory studies for Les Grandes Baigneuses, an unfinished masterpiece.

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