We are largely making this trip up as we go. With friends’ homes to visit and their helpful suggestions, there have been destinations. But it’s often the interstitium — the unexpected finds in between — that knit the journey together. In the old days you’d be following around like sheep with a Lonely Planet or Fodor’s guide in hand. We’ve been relying on travel reporting from The UK Telegraph and suggestions from locals and old fashioned spontaneity, stopping at any intriguing spots as we chase the waning autumn sunshine south across France and Spain and now Portugal.
In the town of Lessoux in central France we found a ceramics museum at a bend in the road. It might have actually been a detour. This area had been one of the primary centers of pottery production in southern Europe with a sophisticated mold system that cast intricately decorated bowls and dishes with a beautiful red hue for common people as early as the 2nd Century AD. Ceramic production continued until the 1970s and the museum was built around two modern kilns that were used to make cookware and other products distinctive to the region. The museum was so well done with an audio tour and two floors of exhibits and videos and the history of European ceramics, which offers the crucible to combine culture, cuisine, technology and all sorts of inter-related topics.
Quincey noticed a denim shop in Florac where we stopped on a beautiful drive toward Provence. It was a century old family business making high quality jeans and shirts and aprons out of denim — the fabric so named because it came from Nimes. The young owner sent us on a remarkable drive through the mountains toward Les Cevennes but a month later we are still waiting for the items we ordered.
Through our home base in Le Cannet, we spent a week taking daily art excursions, many of which sparkled. The Foundation Maeght, established by a couple who became very successful contemporary art dealers is a great excursion up in the hills. Most notable was a sculpture garden by the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Labyrinth includes many pieces of his highly imaginative organic forms in various materials permanently exposed to the natural elements.
Joan Miró sculpture at the Maeght Foundation.
In the hilltown of Vence we learned that Henri Matisse became very ill in his mid-life, and was nursed back to health by a young woman, an artist named Monique Borgeous. Matisse was quite taken by this woman who modeled for many of his paintings and used to assist him by painting huge sheets of paper for his cut outs. Eventually she gave up art to become a nun under the name of Sister Jacques-Marie. This turn of events quite affected Matisse, who kept in contact with Sister Jacques-Marie and later dedicated many of his most productive years of creativity to making a chapel, the Rosaire, in her honor. Matisse was all in: from purchasing the property, designing the building, painting a life story of Christ and attending to every detail down to chairs, pews, candle sticks and even the robes the priests wore. This chapel is not just a window into a great artist’s work, but a love story, one of those unrequited tales of affection that novels are written about, a source of inspiration that drives one to ascend into the thin air of the divine.
The Rosaire chapel in Vence designed by Henri Matisse.
I am always surprised to learn of painters whose work I was never aware of on trips to Europe, like Charles Gleyre, an amazing French painter who taught many famous Impressionists at his studio in Switzerland. Or on this trip, the mind-blowing exhibit at the Petite Palais of the Swedish artist Anders Zorn, who was one of the most acclaimed and successful painters of the late 19th century and whose watercolor mastery may never be challenged. The Chagall museum in Provence is an encompassing assemblage of a life’s work and makes you wonder whether he was all of the 20th century painters rolled into one. There is also a magnificent tribute to Pierre Bonnard in Le Cannet, a brooding post Impressionist with a wicked paintbrush and sense of color and perfect incompletion — though the audio tour could be greatly improved.
What do I take away from visiting the great artists? Simplify then exaggerate. Stay true to your material and never stop working the themes and variations that appear to you. Don’t be afraid to be explicit. Feed the imagination. Be elegant. Try not to get down. Make friends, make movements, make your own story.
Cropped watercolor painting by the Swedish master Anders Zorn.
At Santiago de Compostela is a fairly new museum dedicated to the millennia long tradition of walking pilgrimages, known more popularly today as the Camino de Santiago. This hill town is where the journey often culminates for hikers from Spain or France or Germany or Portugal. And it is where the remains of Saint James were relocated from the Middle East by true devotees during the Middle Ages. This relocation was called il transito. The Museo de las Peregrinaciones y de Santiago is everything a museum should be, focused yet complex and clear and brightly lit and devoted to the idea of pilgrimage as a universal phenomenon, taking us backward and forward in time, showing the art and symbolism and culture and motivation behind seekers from time immemorial walking across landscapes for atonement, purification, chivalry, forgiveness, punishment, and now, modern tourism.
In the southwestern corner of Spain we climbed a hill in A Guarda where you have a vista of the Spanish beaches that lie north and to the south across a big bay is the Portugese side of the Atlantic Ocean. Strangely, as we ate our picnic lunch in a cold onshore ocean wind, the Spanish were hacking away at the woods in the middle of this park, expressing a kind of savage agroforestry we had been witnessing for a few days, huge patches gouged across forested slopes, replaced by linear plantings of eucalyptus and pine. It seemed more like monocrop farming than forestry but then again, the province of Galicia is a mess of intensive land use and sprawling never ending coastal development.
Foundations of an ancient hilltop village in southwestern Spain.
Toward the top of the hill we found an archaeological restoration of an ancient village, or castro, demonstrating how people lived there through the neolithic and Iron and Bronze ages. Circular houses were made of stone foundations with thatched roofs and wooden lintels and sleeping lofts inside. The houses were very tightly clustered, spanning both sides of the mountainside so that they could defend themselves and control trade routes. Many thousands of people lived in this castro and there were natural springs and cisterns for water. Farther up we stopped in the Museo Arqueolóxico de Santa Trega where we saw examples of pottery, jewelry and metal work and beautiful designs they carved into stone building blocks. We imagined the ecstatic moment when the archeologist discovered this site in the 1920s.
The friendly museum supervisor told us that the springs that formerly supplied the castro had long ago dried up since an Australian monk introduced the eucalyptus tree to Spain, now desiccating the water tables of their intensively managed forest landscapes.