Paul Cézanne Prints

About Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born in January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a banker, and returned to the town and its landscape throughout his life. He took evening drawing classes in Aix and in 1861 went to Paris to the Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro, who later taught him to paint outdoors in Pontoise and Auvers in 1872 to 1874. He showed with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877, to general ridicule, then withdrew to Provence and worked largely alone for two decades, building paintings from small, parallel patches of colour that describe form as a series of planes. The Card Players, five versions painted between 1890 and 1895, the still lifes of apples and jugs, the Bathers and the repeated views of Mont Sainte-Victoire are the results. His first solo exhibition, organised by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in November 1895, introduced him to a younger generation; Picasso and Matisse both called him the father of modern painting. He died in Aix in October 1906. Cézanne's canvases are about structure more than finish, and that structure, the weight of a figure or an apple, is what reads at a distance.