Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) spent most of his working life painting the same few subjects — a mountain outside his home town, apples on a table, his wife, card players in a bar — and in doing so changed what a painting was allowed to be. Matisse and Picasso both called him the father of them all.
He is also the subject of a remarkable amount of confidently repeated nonsense, so where something is disputed below, it says so.
Aix, and a father who disapproved
Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in January 1839. His father Louis-Auguste was a hat dealer who went on to co-found a bank, which made the family comfortable and gave Paul an allowance that supported him for decades.
His father did not encourage his painting. He wanted his son in law, and Cézanne dutifully enrolled at law school in Aix while taking drawing classes at the local free school of drawing under Joseph Gibert, its director. In 1861 he abandoned law for Paris.
At the Collège Bourbon in Aix he had become close friends with Émile Zola. The friendship lasted decades and then ended, apparently over Zola's 1886 novel L'Œuvre, whose central character is a failed painter Cézanne seems to have recognized as himself. They are not known to have spoken again.
Paris, Pissarro and the Impressionists
The early work is dark, heavy and thickly painted, closer to Delacroix than to anything Impressionist. It was repeatedly rejected by the official Salon.
The turn came through Camille Pissarro, who took him out to paint the landscape around Pontoise and Auvers in the early 1870s. The relationship began as teacher and pupil and became a partnership. Under Pissarro the palette lightens, the paint thins, and he starts working outdoors from what is in front of him.
He exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and again in 1877. The reviews were brutal — he attracted more ridicule than anyone else in the group.
A common error worth flagging: he is often said to have shown at the Salon des Refusés in 1873. That exhibition was held in 1863, when Cézanne was 24 and barely started.
What he was actually doing
By the 1880s he had separated from the Impressionists over something fundamental. They were trying to catch a moment of light. He wanted the opposite — something solid and permanent, "like the art of the museums."
The method that came out of it:
- Color as structure. He built form out of patches of color rather than drawing an outline and filling it. A plane turns because the color shifts, not because a line says so.
- Constructive strokes. Small, roughly parallel, angled marks that describe a surface and hold the whole canvas together as a single fabric.
- Shifting viewpoints. A tabletop tilts toward you while the jug on it is seen straight on. He painted objects as the eye actually accumulates them over time rather than from one fixed station point. This is the thing Picasso and Braque took directly.
- Extreme slowness. He worked over the same canvas for months. The dealer Ambroise Vollard claimed to have sat well over a hundred times for his portrait.
The works worth knowing
- Mont Sainte-Victoire — the mountain east of Aix, painted around thirty times in oil plus many watercolors. Watching the series in order is the clearest way to see him move from description toward structure.
- The Card Players — a series of five canvases from the early 1890s, using local farm workers as models. They vary from five figures down to two.
- Still Life with Apples and The Basket of Apples — the still lifes that made apples a serious subject. The tilted planes and impossible tabletops are deliberate.
- The Large Bathers — three large late canvases of nude figures in a landscape, the last worked on until his death.
- Portraits of Hortense Fiquet, his partner and later his wife, painted more than twenty times.
- Self-portraits — around twenty-five to thirty, including Self-Portrait with Palette and Self-Portrait with a Beret.
He never painted Venice, despite the claim appearing on a number of sites. He barely left Provence and Paris.
Recognition, late
Ambroise Vollard gave him his first solo exhibition in 1895, when Cézanne was 56. It was the beginning of real recognition, and it came from younger painters rather than from critics.
He kept working in near-isolation at Aix. In October 1906 he was caught in a storm while painting outdoors, collapsed, and died of pneumonia a few days later at 67.
The memorial exhibition in Paris the following year was seen by Picasso, Braque, Matisse and most of the generation that made the next fifty years of painting.
Common questions
What did Cézanne paint with?
Oil, and a great deal of watercolor, in which he was exceptional. Acrylic did not exist in his lifetime.
Was he an Impressionist or a Post-Impressionist?
Post-Impressionist, though the term was invented after his death. He exhibited with the Impressionists early on and then moved deliberately away from them.
What is his most expensive painting?
A version of The Card Players sold in 2011, reportedly to Qatar, for a figure widely put at around $250 million. It was a private sale, not an auction, and the price has never been officially confirmed. It is not the auction record — that is Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, sold in 2017.
How did he influence Cubism?
Through the shifting viewpoints and the reduction of forms toward simple geometric solids. Picasso and Braque took both directly, and both said so.
Did Van Gogh copy Cézanne?
No. Van Gogh made copies after Millet, Delacroix and Japanese prints. He could not have copied The Card Players, which was begun after his death in 1890.
Where can I see his work?
The Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, the Courtauld, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Hermitage all hold significant paintings.
What to take from him if you paint
The transferable lesson is not the shifting perspective — that is the hard part and the last part. It is the patience.
He painted the same mountain for twenty years, and the reason it improved is that he kept looking at it rather than moving on. Painting one subject repeatedly teaches more than painting twenty subjects once.
If you would like to spend time with a brush without also solving composition, a paint by numbers kit removes those decisions and leaves the handling. Our designs are original artwork licensed from working painters rather than reproductions of famous paintings — you can see the full range, or have a canvas made from your own photograph.
We wrote about Van Gogh and Monet's Water Lilies separately, both contemporaries who took the same starting point somewhere completely different.
