Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence, a quiet town in the south of France that would anchor his imagination for the rest of his life ^[1]. His father, Louis-Auguste Cezanne, had built a successful hat business and later co-founded a bank in Aix, which made the family prosperous and gave the painter a financial security that most of his fellow artists never knew ^[2].

At the College Bourbon in Aix, Cezanne formed a close friendship with Emile Zola, the future novelist. The two boys hiked the countryside around the town, swam in the Arc river, and traded ambitions: Zola would write, Cezanne would paint ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Paul Cezanne before he became a painter finds a reluctant law student. To satisfy his father he enrolled at the University of Aix to study law in 1859, while quietly taking drawing lessons at the town's free municipal art school ^[2].

The pull of painting won out. In 1861, encouraged by letters from Zola, who had already moved to the capital, Cezanne abandoned law and went to Paris. His father disapproved but eventually granted him a modest allowance, and later a substantial inheritance, so that Cezanne could paint without needing to sell ^[1].

Cezanne's first Paris years were rocky. He failed the entrance examination to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and instead worked at the Academie Suisse, an informal studio where he met Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and other painters who would soon form the Impressionist circle ^[2]. His early canvases were dark, thickly painted, and often violent in subject, executed with a palette knife in what he later called his "couillarde" or ballsy manner. The official Salon rejected his submissions year after year ^[3].

The decisive influence on his development was Pissarro. In the early 1870s Cezanne worked beside the older painter at Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris. Under Pissarro's guidance he lightened his palette, began painting outdoors, and learned to build form with small, deliberate touches of color rather than dramatic contrasts of dark and light ^[3]. The House of the Hanged Man, painted at Auvers around 1873, marks this turn and was among the works he showed at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 ^[2].

Critics treated him harshly. His contributions to the 1874 show and to the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 drew some of the cruelest reviews aimed at the group, and after 1877 he stopped exhibiting with them altogether ^[3]. He withdrew increasingly to Provence, developing his art in near isolation while dealers and the public ignored him. That long withdrawal, unusual in any Paul Cezanne biography, turned out to be the condition of his originality.

During the 1880s Cezanne worked out the mature style on which his reputation rests. Rejecting the Impressionist emphasis on fleeting effects of light, he sought something more durable, famously telling younger painters that he wanted to make of Impressionism "something solid and lasting, like the art of the museums" ^[4]. He built his pictures from patches of modulated color, each stroke functioning at once as a record of perception and a unit of construction. Outlines waver, perspectives tilt, and objects are seen from slightly shifting viewpoints, yet the finished canvases feel monumentally stable ^[3].

His subjects were few and repeatedly revisited. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire, the limestone ridge east of Aix, in dozens of oils and watercolors, treating the mountain as a permanent motif against which he could test his method ^[4]. His still lifes, especially the arrangements of apples, oranges, bottles, and rumpled cloth, redefined the genre; The Basket of Apples, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, deliberately combines incompatible viewpoints in a single composition ^[5]. The Card Players series of the early 1890s, showing Provencal farmhands absorbed in their game, ranks among his most admired figure paintings, with versions held by the Musee d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Courtauld Gallery ^[2].

Recognition arrived late. In 1895 the young dealer Ambroise Vollard mounted Cezanne's first solo exhibition in Paris, showing roughly 150 works by a painter then fifty-six years old and almost unknown to the public ^[4]. Fellow artists responded immediately: Monet, Degas, and Renoir bought canvases, and a generation of younger painters began making pilgrimages toward his work. Among Paul Cezanne achievements, this slow conquest of the most demanding audience, other painters, may be the most telling.

Cezanne was guarded, irritable, and deeply attached to routine. In 1869 he met Marie-Hortense Fiquet, a young bookbinder and artist's model in Paris. Their son Paul was born in 1872, but Cezanne concealed the relationship from his formidable father for years, fearing the loss of his allowance. He finally married Hortense in Aix in 1886, only months before Louis-Auguste died and left him a considerable fortune ^[1]. Hortense sat for him with extraordinary patience; he painted her portrait more than two dozen times, more often than any other model ^[5].

The same year brought a painful break. Zola published his novel L'Oeuvre in 1886, whose central character, a gifted painter who fails to realize his vision and ends in suicide, was widely read as a portrait drawn partly from Cezanne. Cezanne sent his old friend a brief letter of thanks for the book, and the two men, companions since boyhood, apparently never met again ^[1].

He remained a practicing Catholic in later life, attending mass regularly in Aix, and lived much of the time with his mother and sister at the family estate, the Jas de Bouffan, while Hortense and their son stayed mostly in Paris ^[2]. Diagnosed with diabetes in 1890, he grew more solitary and more single-minded, organizing his days entirely around painting ^[4].

The last decade of Cezanne's life was his most productive. After the family sold the Jas de Bouffan in 1899, he worked from rented rooms in Aix, and in 1902 he moved into a purpose-built studio on the Chemin des Lauves, on a hillside north of the town, where the shutters and props of his still lifes can still be seen today ^[6]. From a nearby terrace he painted the late views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, canvases in which the landscape nearly dissolves into faceted planes of blue, green, and ochre ^[4].

In these years he also pushed his most ambitious figure project, the Large Bathers. He worked on monumental compositions of nude figures in landscape for roughly a decade; the largest version, over two meters wide, was left unfinished at his death and is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art ^[5]. Honors began to accumulate: the collector Auguste Pellerin bought heavily, the Salon d'Automne in Paris devoted a room to his paintings in 1904, and young admirers such as Emile Bernard traveled to Aix to question him about his methods ^[4].

Cezanne kept painting outdoors to the end. On October 15, 1906, he was caught in a storm while working on a motif near his studio and collapsed on the road home. He developed pneumonia and died in Aix-en-Provence on October 22, 1906, at the age of sixty-seven ^[2]. A large memorial retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne introduced his full achievement to the Paris art world and stunned the painters who saw it ^[3].

Few painters have mattered more to those who came after. The 1907 retrospective was studied intently by Picasso and Georges Braque, and Cezanne's faceted treatment of form and his shifting viewpoints fed directly into the invention of Cubism over the following years ^[3]. Matisse, who owned a small Cezanne canvas of bathers for decades before donating it to the city of Paris, called him a kind of god of painting, and both Matisse and Picasso are frequently quoted describing Cezanne as the father of them all ^[4].

His market standing eventually matched his influence. The Card Players version sold to Qatar in 2011 reportedly fetched about 250 million dollars, at the time among the highest prices ever paid for a painting ^[7]. Major collections of his work are held by the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Gallery in London, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which owns dozens of his canvases ^[5].

Basic Paul Cezanne facts, the dates, the apples, the mountain, only hint at why he remains central. His real bequest was a way of thinking about painting: the idea that a picture is not a window onto nature but a parallel construction, built stroke by stroke from sensation. In Aix-en-Provence, his preserved Les Lauves studio and the marked walking routes to his Mont Sainte-Victoire viewpoints draw visitors from around the world, and the town he rarely left has become inseparable from his name ^[6].