Aix-en-Provence
— — the colour of the light Cézanne kept painting.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of plane trees and fountains in the limestone hills of Provence. Cézanne walked out of town most mornings to paint Mont Sainte-Victoire, and the mountain still sits where he left it. The Cours Mirabeau runs cool under the canopy. The Saturday market on Place Richelme smells of melon and basil before nine.
Aix-en-Provence, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Aix-en-Provence sits about thirty kilometres north of Marseille, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of southern France. The Romans founded it in 123 BC as Aquae Sextiae, naming it for the thermal springs that still feed the spa quarter. Mont Sainte-Victoire rises east of town to 1,011 metres, the limestone ridge Paul Cézanne painted more than sixty times in the last decades of his life. The historic centre, Vieil Aix, is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes.
The light is the reason the painters came and stayed. Cézanne wrote from his Atelier des Lauves, on the hill north of the cathedral, that the Provençal sun forced him to see in planes rather than lines. The studio is preserved as he left it in 1906, the coats still on the hook and the skulls on the shelf. Late afternoon, the limestone of Sainte-Victoire turns the colour of warm bread, and the violet hour drops slowly over the cypress along the road back into town.
The old town is built from a soft local limestone the masons call pierre de Bibémus, quarried from a plateau east of the city. The same stone shows in the Saint-Sauveur cathedral, parts of which date to the fifth century, and in the seventeenth-century hôtels particuliers along the Cours Mirabeau. Aix has more than forty public fountains, the Quatre-Dauphins among them, the Roi René in the square, the mossy Fontaine Moussue on the Cours, each cut from blocks of the same warm cream stone.