Prospero's Cell A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfù - Lawrence Durrell

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Climb to Vigla in the time of cherries and look down. You will see that the island lies against the mainland roughly in the form of a sickle. On the landward side you have a great bay, noble and serene and almost completely landlocked. Northward the tip of the sickle almost touches Albania and here the troubled blue of the Ionian is sucked harshly between ribs of limestone and spits of sand. ..."


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... It was on a ringing spring day that we discover the house. The sky lay in a heroic blu arc as we came down the stone ladder....You will think it strange to have come all the way from England to this fine Greece promontory where our only company can be rock, air, sky - and all the elementals. ... There is no explanation. It is enough to record that everything is exactly as the fortune-teller said it would be. White house, white rock, friends, and a narrow style of loving; and perhaps a book which will grow out of these scraps as from the rubbish of these old Venetian tombs the cypress cracks the slabs at last and rises up fresh and green."

These words are part of the opening pages of Lawrence Durrell’s book Prospero’s Cell, A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfù. Fascinated by the Ionian island where he had settled in 1935 with his wife Nancy and his family, Lawrence Durrell wrote its history just in 1945. By that time, he lived in Alexandria, Egypt, after his escape from Greece during the Second World War. 

Durrell gives a lyric and evocative portrait of the island that accomodated Ulysses and inspired Shakespeare, in Durrell's words "an ante-room to Aegean Greece." He combines entries from his journal, dated from April 1937 to January 1941, to fragments of the history of the island, its characters, landscapes, and anecdotes. Year after year, season after season, the young man firmly determined to become a famous writer lived and absorbed the island. When it came to write about it, his experience could no longer be separated by the history of Corfù. The freedom of those years, the colours of the landscapes, the people he had met, the stories he had learnt had changed his words and life forever. 

Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself.


Further reading:

Prospero's Cell A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfù, Lawrence Durrell, London, Faber and Faber, 1945.

Photos:
TravelinaGarden.

The Four Seasons by Paul Cézanne.

In 1859, when Paul Cézanne was a young man who reluctantly studied law, his father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, purchased a country estate called Jas de Bouffan ("La Demeure des Vents", or "The house of the Winds") just outside Aix-en-Provence, France.

The imposing and neglected seventeenth century house,  surrounded by woods and ample cultivated lands, became the Sunday retreat for the family of this wealthy banker, whose fortune had begun with a hat shop.

Louis-Auguste, a severe and practical man, expected his only son to become a lawyer or a notary, and arranged his education accordingly. However, music and painting became soon more interesting, and, supported by his mother, Paul was allowed to attend the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin (Free Drawing School) in Aix-en-Provence. His father also allowed him to exercise his talent decorating the walls of the rooms at the ground floor at Jas de Bouffan, rooms used as storage.

In a corner of a large hall, Paul painted four narrow and tall panels representing the four seasons, as four women carrying appropriate flowers and fruits. Spring and Summer opposite to Autumn and Winter, and, in the middle, there was the portrait of his father reading a newspaper. Paul found inspiration for this work in the illustrations of Le Magasin Pittoresque, a popular illustrated magazine, following a theme that, from ancient times, was celebrated in arts as an allegory of the cycle of life.
Maybe Paul’s intentions were not so serious. He signed the panels "Ingres", adding the year 1811 on the left corner of the panel dedicated to winter, with clear reference to the picture “Jupiter and Thetis” signed by Ingres and dated Rome, 1811, on display at the Museum Granet in Aix-en-Provence. By comparing his young talent to that of the well-known painter, Paul was sending an ironic message to his father, who stubbornly refused to let him go to Paris. Eventually, Paul left Aix-en-Provence in 1861, but he often returned, and he settled there permanently in 1877.

Jas du Buffon, the family house from 1870, was sold in 1899, after his mother’s death. The house, with its quiet and silent environment, the long entrance alley of chestnut trees, the garden, the pond and views of the countryside, offered inspiration for nearly forty years. Nature was different in the painter’s mature eye: basic geometric shapes, lines and colours to define the design, to give depth and perspective, to add contrasts and light. Paul's palette is listed in Emile Bernard’s small book of memories. Yellows: brilliant yellow, naples yellow, chrome yellow, yellow ochre, raw sienna. Reds: vermilion, indian red, burnt sienna, madder lake, carmine lake, burnt crimson lake. Greens: viridian, emerald  green, green earth. Blues: cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, prussian blue, peach black, lead white.

In his last years, Paul lived on 23 rue Boulegon in Aix-en-Provence, but his studio was in the countryside, near a road called chemin des Lauves, on a hill. Inside the building, there were the objects that he painted in his last still lifes, outside, there was the inspiring Provencal landscape, a nature he never failed to observe.


Further reading:
Emile Bernard, Mi ricordo Cézanne, Milano, Skira editore, 2011.

Photos:
The Four Seasons: Wikipainting.
Flowers: Travelinagarden.