The Life and Art of Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born on the 19th of January 1839 in the town of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. This is the story of an artist who dreamed of painting his entire life and yet was rejected repeatedly by the artistic establishment. Despite working in relative obscurity, he quietly transformed western art and left a powerful legacy for generations of artists who followed. Henri Matisse once said of Cézanne, These are extraordinary claims about a man whose paintings at first glance appear remarkably cool and restrained. Yet Cézanne's influence on the course of modern art was nothing short of In 1839, Aix-en-Provence was a rustic provincial town far removed from the pace and fashion of Paris. Cézanne's life was entwined with the town from birth until death. He would have known its golden stone boulevards and leafy squares intimately, the plain trees casting long fountains murmuring at the centre of daily life. Beyond the town, the countryside opened out into fields and low hills. In season, his mother would go grape picking with other locals. Olive groves spread across the region in grey-green waves, running down through the valleys and slopes, stretching almost without break towards the distant blue line of the Mediterranean coast. Paul grew up in comfortable if parochial circumstances. His father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, was a successful hat maker and merchant, so much so that when the only existing bank in Aix-en-Provence failed, Louis-Auguste and his business partner were able to step in and rescue it. His success as a banker provided his son Paul with lifelong financial security. This financial guarantee, paradoxically, may explain both Cézanne's artistic freedom and his slow rise to recognition. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he could paint without explicit concern for the marketplace, free to experiment and develop at his own pace. Paul's mother, Anne-Elisabeth Honorine Aubert, had worked as a chairmaker before her marriage. Paul was the eldest of three children. Growing up in provincial Aix, the young Paul attended the Collage Bourbon, where he formed a lifelong friendship with a fellow student named Émile Zola, who would later become one of France's greatest writers. The two boys were inseparable, spending their days exploring the countryside around Aix, swimming in the Arc River, discussing art, literature and their dreams of escape from In a letter to Zola, sent from Aix in the spring of 1858, Cézanne gives a hint of their adventures. Louis-Auguste Cézanne had clear plans for his son's future. As a pragmatic businessman, he insisted that Paul study law, a respectable profession. Paul dutifully enrolled at the law school at the University of Aix in 1858, but his heart was never in it. He spent his time sketching in the margins of his law books and attending evening drawing classes at the local art school. The tension between father and son grew. At loggerheads with his father, the 21-year-old Cézanne was in turns bored, discouraged and disillusioned. His friend Zola attempted to console in a letter. Recover your courage, seize your brushes again, let your imagination roam like And so, at the age of 22, in 1861, Paul made a decisive choice. He rejected his father's plans and announced his intention to move to Paris and become a painter. His father, though disappointed, did not abandon his son. He agreed to provide Paul with a modest allowance which would continue for until his father's death in 1868, when Paul inherited the entire family estate. In 1861, Cézanne arrived in Paris, joining his friend Zola, who had moved there the previous year. Paris in the 1860s was the undisputed centre of the art world, and the young Cézanne was eager to immerse himself in it. He applied to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, but was rejected. Undeterred, he enrolled at the Académie Suisse, a less formal institution where artists could work from live models without the rigid instruction of the official schools. It was here that he met Camille Pissarro, the impressionist artist ten years his senior, who had become a crucial influence and a friend. Cézanne's twenties were a period of intense study and experimentation. His days were filled with lessons at the Suisse, interspersed with time spent with Zola. In November 1863, he applied to the Louvre Museum for permission to copy paintings, and began making sketches of old masters by the likes of Peter Paul Rubens. He was particularly drawn to the dramatic compositions of other Baroque masters, like Ribera and Zuberin, whose vivid use of light and dark began to enter Cézanne's art of this time. He was also influenced by more recent artists, like Gustave Courbet and his bold use of the palette knife. Most of all, perhaps, it was the romantic artist Eugène Delacroix and his sumptuous dramas, such as The Death of Sardinapolis, that most moved the young Cézanne. Much of these early works, though largely forgotten now, reveal a young man possessed of strong feelings and a rich, highly cultured imagination that clearly relished the cauldron of history, myth and literature. But recognition eluded him. Year after year, Cézanne submitted his work to the official Paris Salon, the gatekeeper of artistic success in France. And year after year, he was rejected. The conservative jury found his work crude, unfinished and offensive to academic tastes. Cézanne later described these rejections with characteristic understatement. The Salon is the battlefield for the painter. But the wounds ran deep. In 1869, Cézanne met Hortense Ficquet, a 19-year-old artist model. Their relationship would be complicated and often strained, but it would last a lifetime. In 1872, their son, also named Paul, was born. Cézanne worked hard for years to keep both the relationship and the child secret from his domineering father, fearing he would cut off his allowance. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 drove Cézanne from Paris to L'Estac, a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast near Marseille. Here, away from the turmoil of war and the pressures of Parisian artistic politics, something profound began to shift in his work. His friend Camille Pissarro invited him to the village of Pontoise, northwest of Paris, where they painted together en plein air, outdoors, directly from nature. Pissarro, with infinite patience, encouraged Cézanne to lighten his palette, to observe nature more As Pissarro later recalled, The change in Cézanne's work was decisive. The heavy, dark paintings of his youth gave way to lighter colours and primary tones. Works like The House of Dr Gachet from 1872 demonstrate this transformation. His brushwork became more patient, more deliberate, more interested in the subtle shifts of light and shade. It is a composition of warm oranges, reds and greens, where every inch of the canvas exhibits delicate tonal relationships. In 1874, with Pissarro's encouragement, Cézanne joined the First Impressionist Exhibition. He showed his works alongside Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and others. The exhibition may have been mocked by the critics, but for many of the Impressionists it represented a breakthrough. Less so for Cézanne. One reviewer singled out his painting A Modern Olympia for particular ridicule, calling it a sort of optical chaos. Cézanne exhibited again in the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877, but the hostile reception wounded him deeply. After this, he largely withdrew from the Parisian art scene, returning to the south of France to work in relative isolation. From the 1880s onward, Cézanne's sense of personal frustration grew as his peers found success. Zola was becoming a renowned novelist. Monet and Renoir were enjoying lucrative sales. Cézanne, meanwhile, divided his time between Paris and Aix, increasingly withdrawing from society to focus on capturing the landscapes of Provence and on his meticulously arranged still-life compositions. And yet, despite a lack of critical acceptance, a quiet breakthrough was taking place in his art. He began to emphasize the integrity of his subjects, building a sense of mass and volume with firm blocks of paint instead of using the flickering brush marks typical of Impressionism. Whether he was painting a mountain, an apple, or a portrait, the brushstrokes worked like small architectural bricks, constructing his subjects and emphasizing their sensory presence rather than as objects of knowledge. This more meticulous approach to painting came as a result of his own direct observations of nature. As he would later write I progress very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex ways, and the progress needed is endless. One must look at the model and feel very exactly, and also express oneself distinctly and with force. In 1886, several significant events occurred. Urged by his family, he finally married Hortense, legitimizing their son. Six months later, however, his father died, leaving Cézanne financially independent at last. No less devastating, his lifelong friendship with Émile Zola came to a bitter end when Zola published L'Herbe, The Masterpiece, a novel about a failed suicidal painter that many consider was based on Cézanne himself. The two never spoke again, and it's thought that Cézanne felt the betrayal keenly. During this time, still-life painting became an especially fertile source of experimentation. According to eyewitnesses, when preparing a still life, Cézanne would spend hours, even days, arranging his objects. He would deliberately fold table cloths into precise forms, choose fruit for their tonal contrasts, and use coins to wedge under them, tilting and raising them to exact positions. Every element was carefully considered to create what he called a harmony parallel to nature. The resulting works, like the large pear from about 1895, reveal something extraordinary. Look closely and you'll notice that the perspective is impossible. The table seems to tilt. The plate doesn't sit flat. The painting forms its own logic, a logic that seems to emerge before our eyes. Cézanne was not interested in photographic realism. He was searching for something else, a way to represent the totality of his perceptual experience, to capture not just what he saw from a fixed position, but what he understood about the objects through extended observation, as a composite of different hues, tones, and shapes. By the mid-1890s, recognition for Cézanne's art was finally beginning to come. In 1895, the young art dealer Amboise Vollard took the audacious step of buying some 150 canvases from Cézanne to mount the artist's first one-man exhibition in Paris. The show created a sensation among the young artists, even as conservative critics remained baffled. Maurice Denis, who saw the exhibition, later wrote, One sees a man, clumsy and sublime, who prefers to compromise his work rather than betray his sensation. But even as public recognition mounted, Cézanne's personal life grew more isolated. Bouts of diabetes affected his health, and his relationship with his wife, who was spending more of her time in Paris, remained distant. He spent long periods as a virtual recluse, living with his mother and sister in Aix and painting obsessively. He returned again and again to certain motifs, particularly Mont Saint-Victoire, the limestone mountain that dominated the landscape east of Aix. Its south face, which successive landslides had made almost vertical, presented a stark form of sheer rock. Cézanne painted it more than 60 times from various angles and distances, each version a new meditation on form, colour and light. In his later versions, from 1902 to 1904, the landscape begins to disintegrate into pure paint. The sky becomes simple overlapping tiles of colour, varying in tone. The mountain and landscape dissolve into a patchwork of brushstrokes, with only crude marks delineating forms. These works pointed the way forward for abstract art, showing how paint itself, organised into patches of colour and tone, could evoke natural forms without imitating them. This was not a call to reduce nature to simple geometric shapes, but rather to understand the underlying structure of forms, to see through surface appearances, to the essential sense of In November 1901, when Cézanne was 63 years old, he bought a small country property for 2000 francs, just a 10 minute walk from the old town of Aix. Having chosen the upstairs room for its high ceiling, he had tall windows fitted, and ensured that its principal window faced north for an even cast of light. In the final years of his life, from 1900 to 1906, Cézanne worked on his most ambitious project, a series of large paintings of bathers in the landscape. The Grand Bathers, completed shortly before his death, represents the culmination of his artistic vision. The painting shows nude figures arranged beneath an arc of trees, forming a monumental architectonic composition. The bodies are simplified, almost geometric, integrated into the landscape through what Cézanne called light vibrations, the subtle modulations of colour that create both form and space. On October the 15th, 1906, Cézanne was caught in a thunderstorm while painting outdoors. He collapsed and was brought home by a passing laundry cart. He developed pneumonia and died a week later, on October the 22nd, at the age of 67. His last recorded words were in a letter to his paint supplier, written the day before he died, ordering more materials. To the end, Cézanne was painting, searching, yet never satisfied. He remained awkward in company, and was sometimes resentful of the attention his success was bringing him. And yet, the admiration lauded on him by younger artists was also a cause for long-awaited satisfaction. Within months of Cézanne's death, his influence had begun to reshape modern art. In 1907, a major retrospective of his work was held in Paris. The young Pablo Picasso, then 26 years old, and Georges Braque, studied Cézanne's paintings intensely, particularly his use of faceted planes and multiple perspectives. Between 1908 and 1910, Picasso and Braque developed these ideas into cubism, one of the most revolutionary art movements of the 20th century. But Cézanne's influence extended far beyond. Henri Matisse and the Fauves learned from his expressive use of color. Abstract painters saw his work as permission to move beyond representation entirely. Others still admired his retreat from society into a purer form of artistic evolution. Cézanne's career was full of contradictions. He loved both classical order and romantic passion. His works rarely achieved the perfection he sought. In that ceaseless search for visual tension and harmony between spatial relationships, he opened the door to modernism. From Cézanne onwards, artists would freely emphasize the intrinsic unity between a depicted scene and the painted surface of the canvas. Form and content would no longer be separate entities. In a letter written late in life, Cézanne reflected, the day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution. That day had arrived and the revolution continues still.