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Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
(1839-1906) was born in the town of Aix-en-Provence in southern
France. He received his schooling at Aix, where he became boyhood
friends with author Émile Zola. He followed the wishes
of his father, a prosperous banker, and studied law, but soon
gave it up and went to Paris in 1861 to study art. There he became
acquainted with artists such as Gustave Courbet, Édouard
Manet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Although Cézanne
was rejected for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts,
the official art school, he took lessons at the Académie
Suisse and was an ardent admirer of the Old Masters, particularly
Nicolas Poussin and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Despite
his bitter disappointment at repeated failures to be admitted
to the official Salon exhibitions, he showed several times in
the 1870s with the Impressionists. He did not share the Impressionists’
interest in capturing the fleeting effects of light, but rather
sought to analyze nature’s structure. He stated, "I
wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring,
like the art in the museums."
In 1869, he
met Hortense Fiquet, a model who bore his son Paul in 1872 and
eventually became his wife. Cézanne lived most of his life
in Aix, with occasional stays in Paris and elsewhere in Provence.
After working for years in relative obscurity, he had his first
one-person exhibition in 1895 at the gallery of Ambrose Vollard
in Paris. Cézanne exhibited regularly during the last decade
of his life and his reputation was secured with a memorial exhibition
in 1907, one year after his death. His work profoundly influenced
many artists, perhaps most notably Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
Their development of Cubism grew out of Cézanne’s
geometric approach to form and use of multiple viewpoints.
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