Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, a hat dealer who became a banker and in 1848 opened the Cézanne et Cabassol bank, which gave the family a comfortable life. At the Collège Bourbon he befriended Émile Zola. From 1857 he studied drawing at the municipal school in Aix under Joseph Gibert and, at his father's wish, briefly studied law before giving it up around 1860. In 1861 he went to Paris, failed to enter the École des Beaux-Arts and attended the free Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro. From 1872 he worked beside Pissarro at Pontoise, and he showed with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877. He married Hortense Fiquet in 1886, lived chiefly in Aix from about 1900 and had a studio built at Les Lauves in 1901-02. He died in Aix on 22 October 1906 of pneumonia, a week after a storm caught him painting outdoors.

Cézanne's early canvases are dark and heavily worked, in the wake of Delacroix and Courbet; encouraged by Pissarro, he lightened his palette and painted out of doors. He then moved away from the Impressionist effect of the passing moment, building form through gradations of colour rather than light and shadow and letting each object keep its own place in the picture. He returned to Mont Sainte-Victoire again and again from the mid-1880s. In Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (about 1887, Courtauld Gallery, London) green and yellow fields lead the eye to a mountain painted in cool blues and pinks, with a railway viaduct crossing the view. The Card Players exists in five canvases made in the 1890s, among them the two-player version (about 1894-95, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). The Large Bathers (1900-1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art), his largest and last treatment of nudes in a landscape, was still unfinished at his death.

Paris avant-garde painters began to discover Cézanne in the 1890s, and after his death a large retrospective at the Salon d'Automne strongly influenced the Cubists. Picasso is said to have called him the father of us all, and Matisse is reported to have called him a kind of dear god of painting. The studio at Les Lauves passed to his son Paul, and after it was bought in 1952 by a committee of admirers it became a museum. Cézanne said he wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums, and his canvases bear that out: thin, broken touches of colour that stack up into mass, a cool and warm palette set side by side, and a patient construction that gives a painter working in oils a great deal to follow in the layering of paint, the modelling of form by hue and the balance of a whole canvas.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.