ABOVE: Detail from Paul Cézanne’s Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L’Estaque(circa 1883). The U.S. National Gallery of Art has announced a Cézanne show for the new year, to celebrate the 100th year since the painter’s death.

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839. He spent an idyllic French childhood, according to the National Gallery of Art, “lying under great pine trees; exploring the ruins of a Roman aqueduct; swimming and fishing in the River Arc; or climbing the rocky canyons to the Zola Dam.” Then he perfected post-impressionism, painted some stuff, and died in 1906. Instead of waiting 33 years and change to celebrate the bicentennial of little Paul’s Provençal birth, the National Gallery has timed its newly-announced exhibit, “Cézanne in Provence,” to coincide with the somewhat less joyous centenary of the painter’s death (he was found unconscious beside his easel in a field in 1906 and died several days later).

The show will run in Washington from January 29 to May 7, 2006, and then hop the Atlantic to Musée Granet in Provence for a June-September run. It includes more than a hundred oil paintings and watercolours, focusing on the artist’s lifelong traipses around the jolly coastlines, rolling hills, and quaint villages of Provence, the place that gave him life. And later took it. Cosmic.

LINK: National Gallery of Art > Cézanne in Provence press release