Paul Cézanne

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Cézanne was born on the 19th of January 1839 at 28 rue de l'Opéra in Aix-en-Provence, a city he would never truly leave behind. He died on the 22nd of October 1906, and within a year of his death, some of the most consequential artists of the following century were crediting him as the source of everything they knew. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso both remarked, independently, that Cézanne "is the father of us all." Georges Braque called his influence an "initiation." Picasso said he was "the only master for me." What compelled such reverence from men who had reinvented painting themselves? The answer lies in the slow, stubborn, largely unrecognized decades Cézanne spent breaking down everything he saw into planes of colour, into cylinders and spheres and cones, chasing a sensation he could never quite pin to canvas. His paintings provoked incomprehension and ridicule for most of his career. The Salon de Paris rejected him every year from 1864 to 1869. Critics performed mocking dances in front of his work. It was not until 1895, when the art dealer Ambroise Vollard staged his first solo exhibition in Paris, that a wider public began to take notice. By then Cézanne was fifty-six years old. What drove a man to keep working in near-obscurity for three decades? And how did that solitary, difficult work become the bridge between Impressionism and what we now call modern art?

• 2. The Three Inseparables

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  In 1852, Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix and fell in with two classmates who would shape his early ambitions: Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. The three called themselves "Les Trois Inséparables" - the Three Inseparables. They swam and fished on the banks of the Arc River, debated art, read Homer and Virgil, and wrote their own poems. Cézanne wrote his verses in Latin. Zola urged him to take poetry more seriously, but Cézanne saw it only as a pastime; painting was where his real energy went. Zola, already living in Paris by the time Cézanne considered following, was the one who urged his hesitant friend to abandon Aix and come to the capital. It was Zola's faith that helped push Cézanne toward his calling. Yet the friendship quietly curdled over the following decades. By the late 1870s, Zola had become a celebrated, prosperous writer with a luxurious summer home in Médan near Auvers. Cézanne, who lived an unassuming life, felt the contrast keenly. In March 1886, Zola published his roman à clef L'Oeuvre, whose protagonist was a painter who failed to realize his ambitions and died by suicide. Cézanne found himself reflected in many details. He wrote Zola a formal letter of thanks and, for a long time afterward, it was assumed the friendship had ended there. Letters discovered later show at least some contact continued into 1887. When Zola died in 1903, Cézanne mourned him despite the years of estrangement.

• 3. Father, Bank, and Escape

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  Louis-Auguste Cézanne, born in 1798, was co-founder of the banking firm Banque Cézanne et Cabassol, and he expected his son to follow him into finance. In 1859, at his father's insistence, Paul enrolled in the law faculty of the University of Aix-en-Provence. He spent two years in those unloved studies, increasingly neglecting lectures in favour of drawing exercises and poems. His father bought the Jas de Bouffan estate that same year - a partly derelict baroque residence of a former provincial governor. In 1860, Cézanne obtained permission to paint the walls of its drawing room and created large-format murals of the four seasons, which he ironically signed as Ingres, a painter whose work he did not appreciate. The winter picture carries an additional date of 1811, an allusion to Ingres' painting Jupiter and Thetis. Cézanne left Aix for Paris in 1861, pushed by Zola's encouragement. His father eventually reconciled with the choice, on the condition that Paul undertake a regular course of study - and he secured his son's subsistence with a monthly allowance, first over 150 francs, later 100 francs. Louis-Auguste died in October 1886, leaving Cézanne an inheritance of 400,000 francs. Cézanne looked back on his father with complicated respect: "My father was a brilliant man," he said. "He left me an income of 25,000 francs."

• 4. Pissarro and the Palette

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  Camille Pissarro was ten years Cézanne's senior when the two first met at the Académie Suisse in Paris. For a long time, Cézanne described himself simply as Pissarro's pupil, calling him "God the Father" and saying: "We all stem from Pissarro." Their early relationship was one of master and disciple; over the course of the following decade, landscape painting excursions together in Louveciennes and Pontoise evolved into a working relationship between equals. Pissarro was a patient mentor to the shy, irritable Cézanne. He persuaded him to turn away from the dark, heavy palette of his early years and gave him specific guidance: "Always only paint with the three primary colours (red, yellow, blue) and their immediate deviations," and to define shapes from the gradation of colour tonal values rather than linear contour. From late 1872 to 1874, Cézanne lived with Hortense Fiquet and their son Paul in Auvers-sur-Oise, and in 1872 he accepted Pissarro's invitation to work together in Pontoise in the Oise Valley. Cézanne felt that the Impressionist technique was bringing him closer to his goal and followed his friend's advice. Pissarro later reflected on what their closeness had yielded: "We were always together, but still each of us kept what counts alone: our own feelings." Pissarro also pushed for Cézanne's inclusion in the first Impressionist group exhibition in 1874, overcoming the reservations of members who feared his bold paintings might harm the show.

• 5. Ridicule and Recognition

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  The first Impressionist group exhibition ran from the 15th of April to the 15th of May 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar on Boulevard des Capucines. The critic Louis Leroy, writing in the satirical magazine Le Charivari, coined the term "Impressionists" as a mockery - a name the group eventually wore proudly. Cézanne in particular drew derision. One critic performed what he called an Indian dance in front of Cézanne's The House of the Hanged Man and A Modern Olympia, shouting lines in parody. Manet, who declined to exhibit, dismissed Cézanne as "a mason who paints with a trowel." The exhibition was a financial failure, ending with a deficit of over 180 francs per participating artist. One of the few paintings sold was Cézanne's The Hanged Man's House, bought by the collector Count Doria for 300 francs. The turnaround came slowly. In 1877, when Cézanne presented 16 works at the third Impressionist exhibition, the reviewer Louis Leroy responded to his portrait of the collector Victor Chocquet with a notice so hostile it has become infamous. By 1895, Ambroise Vollard opened Cézanne's first solo exhibition in his Paris gallery, showing a selection of around 50 works from approximately 150 Cézanne had sent him. Pissarro wrote from Paris in June 1899 about the forthcoming auction of the Chocquet collection: "The Cézannes will fetch very high prices and are already estimated at four to five thousand francs." Even so, those prices remained below those commanded by Manet, Monet, or Renoir. Prices for Cézanne's works eventually rose a hundredfold, and Vollard, who had stocks from the lean years, profited accordingly.

• 6. Method and Sensation

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  Cézanne's letter of the 15th of April 1904 to the painter and art theorist Émile Bernard has been quoted ever since: "Treat nature according to cylinder, sphere, and cone and put the whole in perspective, like this that each side of an object, of a surface, leads to a central point." Bernard, who spent a month with Cézanne in February 1904, reported watching a vanitas still life with three skulls change colour and form every single day, though it appeared complete from day one. Bernard later described Cézanne's process as starting with the shadow parts, placing one spot, then a second larger one, then a third, until the shades modelled the object through colour alone. Three terms governed how Cézanne described his own work. The "motif" was not just the representational subject but the motivation for tireless observation. "Aller sur le motif" - going to the motif - meant entering into a relationship with an external object that moved the artist inwardly. "Sensation" meant both the visual impression and the psychological reaction to it. "Réalisation" described the actual painterly act, which Cézanne feared would fail him until the end. "Painting from nature does not mean copying the object," he said, "it means realizing its sensations." To the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, who visited him on the 13th of April 1906, Cézanne emphasized that the main thing in a picture is the meeting of distance. On the 5th of September 1906, weeks before his death, he wrote to his son Paul: "As a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses, I do not possess that wonderful richness of colour that animates nature."

• 7. The Last Painting

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  On the 15th of October 1906, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the open air. After two hours he turned for home, collapsed, and lost consciousness on the road. A passing driver of a laundry cart carried him home. Hypothermia set in and became severe pneumonia. His housekeeper, Mme Bremond, whom he had hired after selling the Jas de Bouffan estate in November 1899, rubbed his arms and legs until circulation returned. The next morning, Cézanne went into the garden to work on what would be his last painting, Portrait of the Gardener Vallier, and wrote an impatient letter to his paint dealer about a delayed delivery. Later that day he fainted again. Vallier called for help. Cézanne was put to bed and never left it. A telegram reached his wife Hortense and son Paul, but they arrived too late. He died on the 22nd of October 1906 of pneumonia, at the age of 67, and was buried at the Saint-Pierre Cemetery in Aix-en-Provence. Two posthumous retrospectives in 1907 brought his work before a new generation. From the 17th to the 29th of June, the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris showed 79 watercolours. The 5th Salon d'Automne followed in October, showing 49 paintings and seven watercolours in two rooms of the Grand Palais. Among those who attended were Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso - artists who left those rooms carrying ideas that would reshape what painting could be.