Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, where his friendship with the future writer Émile Zola began at school. His family’s prosperity supported a serious education, but art drew him away from a conventional career. He spent time in Paris absorbing new painting, while repeatedly returning to the landscape and everyday objects of the south of France.
His father expected him to enter a respectable profession, and Cézanne studied law before pursuing painting. The tension between family expectations and artistic conviction accompanied his early visits to Paris. There he copied older paintings and encountered a contemporary world very different from Aix, gradually developing a practice that could draw strength from both places.
Making colour hold its shape
Contact with the Impressionists encouraged brighter colour and broken brushwork. Cézanne developed those discoveries into a slower investigation of form. Apples, figures and hills became arrangements of related colour, with each brushstroke contributing to the whole. His still lifes can feel unsettled and solid at once, asking us to consider the experience of looking rather than a single fixed viewpoint.
Camille Pissarro became an important colleague, encouraging him to work outdoors. Cézanne also met Hortense Fiquet, a Parisian bookbinder who became his model and companion. Their son Paul was born in 1872. The relationship was kept from his disapproving father for years; Cézanne and Hortense eventually married in 1886, after a long shared life.
The mountain and the modern world
Hortense sat for numerous portraits, while familiar objects and landscapes became companions to his investigations of painting. Cézanne increasingly worked in Provence, away from the Parisian art world. Younger artists came to regard his persistence as a radical example: a picture could be built through relationships of colour while preserving the complexity of actual perception.
Provence supplied enduring subjects, including Mont Sainte-Victoire. Cézanne returned to them with extraordinary persistence, finding new relationships between foreground, distance and sky. His work became a crucial point of reference for modern painting. Look at the spaces between his forms as well as the forms themselves: they help turn a landscape into a world constructed, patiently, in paint.
Art to live with.
Fine-art prints on 200 gsm paper. Choose unframed or explore the available frame finishes, in a size that suits your space.
