Standing beside a limestone quarry, gazing over a vista of green and gold to a geometrical mountain ridge, you get the uncanny feeling of having intruded into a 19th-century painting. That may be because you have, since this is the landscape claimed as his own by one of France’s most illustrious painters.

Great artists are rarely strangers to obsession and Paul Cézanne was no exception. In the artist’s later years he developed a mania for painting the profile of Mont Sainte-Victoire above the village of Le Tholonet just outside Aix-en-Provence. The scene inspired some of Cézanne’s greatest works. Picasso famously gloated smugly to his agent about snapping up Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire masterpiece. “Which one?” the agent replied laconically.

Cézanne painted it 44 times in oils and 43 in watercolour. He caught the chill that killed him trying to capture it once more in the late autumn of 1906.

Hiking up from the village of Le Tholonet, you can get an inkling of the artist’s obsession as the jagged mountain emerges spectacularly between the trees in a region rich with greens more suited to a lusher northern France, dusted with the ochres and golds of the south.

“Its blueness merges with the breath of the air,” said Cézanne, with the ethereal inarticulacy of a visual artist. He refused to wear glasses and suffered from diabetes, so his grasp of colour was always going to be idiosyncratic.

A visit to Sainte-Victoire is a complement to a full panoply of Cézanne attractions in a year marking the centenary of his death. The highlight is an exhibition, Cézanne en Provence, opening in June at the Musée Granet in Aix, previously only displayed in Washington DC, gathering 110 works from international collections. The exhibition will attract art lovers from all over Europe and will underline Cézanne’s connection with Provence and its vivid light and landscape.

A walking tour of the Cézanne associations in the town of Aix (marked by plaques on the pavement) gives you a sense of the history of the artist and Aix, in the process introducing you to a serene Provençal town where everyone seems to spend an inordinate amount of time in cafes and restaurants.

Cézanne wasn’t averse to the occasional pastis himself. Respectful pilgrims can sip along at his old haunts Café des Deux Garçons, Café Oriental, Café Beaufort and Café Clement. “Let’s go to the Clem Caff,” was apparently one of Cézanne’s favourite expressions, although the Aix hipsters who flocked there in the late 19th century all ignored the unsuccessful painter. This was a bar where nobody knew his name.

Cézanne had to wait for posthumous recognition.

Cézanne’s work is the perfect reintroduction to the vivid extremes of a region that for many British visitors has been falsely associated with easy living. Maybe it’s a little harsh (if satisfying) to blame Peter Mayle if Provence has become a word redolent of the self-satisfied English middle classes swigging decent vintages in their restored farmhouses and cooing about property speculation.

In truth, it’s a region with far more history, drama and culture than you could ever absorb in a single visit.

That’s not to say you cannot occasionally indulge the urge for a little sybaritic fine living. Heading north into Vaucluse, one classy detour takes you to Château la Nerthe, a gloriously elegant establishment just outside the village of Châteuneuf du Pape, where a tour and tasting gives you some sense of the meticulous process that makes the area one of the world’s elite wine-growing regions.

An excellent Cuvée des Cadettes starts off at about £41 a bottle, but after you have tasted a few your credit card might start to warm up for action.

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