Our view was of the hills and neighbours ploughing fields or harvesting hay. “God bless the work” as I carried out pots of boiling spuds to feed hungry pigs squealing and grunting at the heavy iron haggard gate.
Our hills were easy to climb, the drumlins of Ballynagearn. They were child’s play. Later, I was to attempt Mont Blanc in France but it was the Mont Saint Victoire which captured my imagination most in the eighties and nineties as I lived a short distance from it in Aiz-en-Provence.
It was Cezanne who first placed the mountain (right) in bright, clear sunlight in the middle of his compositions as the motif. The other elements– pine branches, or the arc valley– are only there to lead our gaze to the mountain, majestic in the centre.
A hundred years after his death, Aix-en-Provence has at last discovered the power of its painter. Up until his death in 1906, he painted the Aix countryside, having returned there in 1870 tired of failure in Paris.
Seen as an absurd original incapable of finishing a painting, he got no recognition from the town or its inhabitants, only indifference and contempt. Some paintings he gave his fellow citizens remained in attics; one in fact, was used to seal a hole in the floor of a hen house.
Cezanne is now the hero of Aix as it celebrates the hundreth anniversary of his death with a splendour perhaps proportional to its bad conscience. Paul Cezanne’s art is linked in various and special ways to his home region, Provence, and with the places and formative experiences of his youth, which he spent in and near Aix-en-Provence.
He did 44 oils and 45 watercolours of Mont Sainte Victoire, it lies north-easterly on the plain of the Arc at over a thousand metres to the east of Aix. He passed away during the night of 22nd October, due to pleurisy. He painted right up to a few days before the end, thus fulfilling his wish to paint up to his death.
Patrick Duffy is a writer, actor and teacher. He was born in Ballynagearn, Magheracloone, Co. Monaghan and spent nine years in Aix-en Provence