15 Works, Today, January 19th is artist Paul Cézanne's day, his story, illustrated #019

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

Detail; Self-portrait, c. 1875

Oil on canvas

Height  : 64.0 cm; Width  : 53.0 cm

Orsay Museum

Paul Cézanne (19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century.

Paul Cézanne 1839 – 1906

Christ in Limbo, c. 1867

Fresco

168 × 100 cm

MuseumMusée d'Orsay, Paris

From his grave Christ descends into Hell. He meets a number of lost souls who may at last go to Heaven.

This fresco used to be on a wall in Cézanne's father's house near Aix-en-Provence. It was later transferred to canvas.

Christ in LimboIt is a copy of a 1516 painting by Sebastiano del Piombo, but done in Cézanne's own style. More on this painting

Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects. 

Paul Cézanne, (1839–1906)

The Overture to Tannhauser: The Artist's Mother and Sister, c. 1868

Oil on canvas

Height: 57.8 cm (22.7 in) Width: 92.5 cm (36.4 in)

Hermitage Museum 

Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence. On 22 February, he was baptized, and became a devout Catholic later in life. His father was the co-founder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance.

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

Paul Alexis Reading a Manuscript to Zola, from 1869 until 1870

Oil on canvas

Height: 130 cm (51.1 in); Width: 160 cm (62.9 in)

São Paulo Museum of Art 

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism.According to major Zola scholar and biographer Henri Mitterand, "Naturalism contributes something more than realism: the attention brought to bear on the most lush and opulent aspects of people and the natural world. The realist writer reproduces the object's image impersonally, while the naturalist writer is an artist of temperament." He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902. More on Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola

In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix, where he became friends with Émile Zola, as well as Baptistin Baille—three friends who came to be known as "Les Trois Inséparables" (The Three Inseparables). He stayed there for six years. In 1857, he began attending the Free Municipal School of Drawing in Aix, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk. From 1858 to 1861, complying with his father's wishes, Cézanne attended the law school of the University of Aix, while also receiving drawing lessons.

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

Self-portrait, c. 1875

Oil on canvas

Height  : 64.0 cm; Width  : 53.0 cm

Orsay Museum

Going against the objections of his banker father, he committed himself to pursue his artistic development and left Aix for Paris in 1861. He was strongly encouraged to make this decision by Zola, who was already living in the capital at the time. Eventually, his father reconciled with Cézanne and supported his choice of career. Cézanne later received an inheritance of 400,000 francs from his father, which rid him of all financial worries.

Camille Pissarro

Portrait of Paul Cezanne, c. 1874

Oil, canvas

73 x 59.7 cm

Location: Private Collection

Camille Pissarro (10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the "pivotal" figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the "dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality".  More on Camille Pissarro

In Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro. Initially the friendship formed in the mid-1860s between Pissarro and Cézanne was that of master and disciple, in which Pissarro exerted a formative influence on the younger artist. 

Camille Pissarro

The street of Hermitage, Pontoise, c. 1874

Oil on canvas

40.4 x 34.8 cm

Private Collection

We can see in this painting by Pissarro how Pissarro, influenced by Cézanne, painted a bit like him by accentuating the structure of the motif - quite banal in itself - by means of more lines. marked and sharper color contrast.

Over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

Dans le parc de Château Noir, between 1898 and 1900

Oil on canvas

92 x 73 cm

Musée de l'Orangerie, Place de la Concorde in Paris

We can see an example of this collaboration with Cezanne's painting "La Côte des Boeufs, Pontoise" from 1877, where he treats the same theme as Pissarro, but in a totally different way which prefigures already the Provencal landscapes of the "Parc du Château Noir" (around 1900).

Camille Pissarro  (1830–1903)

The Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise, c. 1877

Oil on canvas

Height: 114.9 cm (45.2 in); Width: 87.6 cm (34.4 in)

National Gallery, Central London

In Cézanne's mature work there is the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes. 

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

The Pond, circa 1877

Oil on canvas

Height: 470 mm (18.50 in); Width: 562 mm (22.12 in)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials. He wanted to "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone". Additionally, Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of perception. Simultaneous visual perceptions of the same phenomena to provide the viewer with an aesthetic experience of depth. His interest in new ways of modelling space and volume derived from the stereoscopy obsession of his era.

Cézanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882. In that year, through the intervention of fellow artist Antoine Guillemet, he exhibited Portrait de M. L. A., The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement", 1866, .his first and last successful submission to the Salon.

Listing from the official catalogue of the Salon of 1882

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement," c. 1866

Oil on canvas

Height: 198.5 cm (78.1 in); Width: 119.3 cm (46.9 in)

National Gallery, Washington DC

Before 1895 Cézanne exhibited twice with the Impressionists. In later years a few individual paintings were shown at various venues, until 1895, when the Parisian dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave the artist his first solo exhibition. Despite the increasing public recognition and financial success, Cézanne chose to work in increasing artistic isolation, usually painting in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris.

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

Still life with dresser, c.1883 - 87

Oil on canvas

Height: 73.3 cm (28.8 in); Width: 92.2 cm (36.2 in)

Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

Cézanne has painted still lifes since the 1860s and in the course of his life created a large, important group of works in this genre. With him, as with other corresponding painters, among them the Dutch of the 17th and French of the 18th and 19th centuries as important forerunners, it is not 'dead nature' (nature morte), but really the 'quiet life' that governs the The content of such images. More on this painting

Paul Cézanne

Madame Cézanne in a Striped Dress, c. 1885-6

Oil on canvas

H x w mm: 619 x 511

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Paul Cézanne (French, Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906 Aix-en-Provence)

The railway breakthrough, around 1870

Oil on canvas

80.4 x 129.4 cm

Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

Cézanne found the central motif of the picture near her father's country house "Jas de Bouffan". However, he did not see the railway breakthrough as a theme of the industrial revolution, rather it is the connection between the house as the dwelling of man and the mountain as the place of the deity that is cut through here. This significant content is particularly evident from. More on this painting

Paul Cézanne (French, Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906 Aix-en-Provence)

Bathers, c. 1874–75

Oil on canvas

15 x 18 1/8 in. (38.1 x 46 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is one of Cézanne’s first paintings of bathers, a subject that engaged him for the rest of his career. Although fascinated by the nude human figure, the artist worked slowly and was uncomfortable with female models, so he derived such scenes from his imagination and his rich knowledge of classical and Renaissance art. The rhythmic poses of the women, displaying their bodies from different angles, recur, with variations, in Cézanne’s later work. However, he soon tempered the bright, high-keyed palette, favored by his Impressionist colleagues. More on this painting

He concentrated on still lifes, portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers. For the last, Cézanne was compelled to design from his imagination, due to a lack of available nude models. Like the landscapes, his portraits were drawn from that which was familiar, so that not only his wife and son but local peasants, children and his art dealer served as subjects.

Paul Cézanne  (1839–1906)

Mont Sainte-Victoire, c. 1904

Oil on canvas

Height: 70 cm (27.5 in); Width: 92 cm (36.2 in)

Philadelphia Museum

Cézanne's paintings were not well received among the petty bourgeoisie of Aix. In 1903 Henri Rochefort visited the auction of paintings that had been in Zola's possession and published on 9 March 1903 in L'Intransigeant a highly critical article entitled "Love for the Ugly". Rochefort describes how spectators had supposedly experienced laughing fits, when seeing the paintings of "an ultra-impressionist named Cézanne". The public in Aix was outraged, and for many days, copies of L'Intransigeant appeared on Cézanne's door-mat with messages asking him to leave the town "he was dishonouring".

Cézanne died on 22 October 1906 of pneumonia and was buried at the Saint-Pierre Cemetery in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. More on Paul Cézanne

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