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I have a big studio in the country. I work there and feel much better than in town. I’ve been making some progress. Why so late and with so much difficulty?
Letter to Ambroise Vollard, Aix, 9 January 1903
The road called the Chemin des Lauves lies to the north of Aix, towards the village of Puyricard. Cézanne had a studio built there and painted at Les Lauves for the last four years of his life. It was a period of profound, powerful and extremely daring creativity. In addition to still lifes, portraits and studies of Mount Sainte-Victoire, the artist also turned to the subject of female bathing nudes, which he had first worked on in the early 1870s.
For Cézanne, now sixty years of age, it was a way of recalling the happy, carefree days of his youth, the long walks in the countryside around Aix with his friends Zola and Baille, the lazy hours on the banks of the river Arc. Underlying his exploration of the theme, however, was a deeper motivation than mere nostalgia, one which had more to do with his veneration for the classical painters of the past: to reunite man and nature, to attain a point of harmony and perfection.
 Cézanne was finishing the portrait of my father. I sat in as he worked. The studio was bare. The easel, a small table with paints, the chair where my father sat and the stove were the only furniture. Cézanne worked standing up… a pile of canvases on the floor against the wall in the corner. (…) Most of the time, although he had his brushes and palette in his hands, Cézanne just observed my father’s face, watching it closely. He didn’t paint. At long intervals, a trembling movement of the brush, just a slight touch, a quick stroke of blue that delineated an expression, released or stated some elusive trait of character… The next day I would find on the canvas the result of the penetration accomplished the day before.
Joachim Gasquet, Conversations avec Cézanne, Ed. Macula, 1978.
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