Cézanne
Since his death 200 years ago, Cézanne has become the most famous painter of the nineteenth century. He was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and the happiest period of his life was his early youth in Provence, in company with Emile Zolá, another Italian. Following Zolá’s example, Cézanne went to Paris in his twenty-first year.
During the Franco-Prussian war he deserted the military, dividing his time between open-air painting and the studio. He said to Vollard, an art dealer, “I’m only a painter. Parisian wit gives me a pain. Painting nudes on the banks of the Arc [a river near Aix] is all I could ask for.” Encouraged by Renoir, one of the first to appreciate him, he exhibited with the impressionists in 1874 and in 1877. He was received with derision, which deeply hurt him.
Cézanne’s ambition, in his own words, was “to make out of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the paintings of the museums.” His aim was to achieve the monumental in a modern language of glowing, vibrating tones. Cézanne wanted to retain the natural colour of an object and to harmonise it with the various influences of light and shade trying to destroy it; to work out a scale of tones expressing the mass and character of the form.
Cézanne loved to paint fruit because it afforded him obedient models and he was a slow worker. He did not intend to simply copy an apple. He kept the dominant colour and the character of the fruit, but heightened the emotional appeal of the form by a scheme of rich and concordant tones. In his paintings of still-life he is a master. His fruit and vegetable compositions are truly dramatic; they have the weight, the nobility, the style of immortal forms. No other painter ever brought to a red apple a conviction so heated, sympathy so genuinely spiritual, or an observation so protracted. No other painter of equal ability ever reserved for still-life his strongest impulses. Cézanne restored to painting the pre-eminence of knowledge, the most essential quality to all creative effort.
The death of his father in 1886 made him a rich man, but he made no change in his abstemious mode of living. Soon afterwards, Cézanne retired permanently to his estate in Provence. He was probably the loneliest of painters of his day. At times a curious melancholy attacked him, a black hopelessness. He grew more savage and exacting, destroying canvases, throwing them out of his studio into the trees, abandoning them in the fields, and giving them to his son to cut into puzzles, or to the people of Aix.
At the beginning of the century, when Vollard arrived in Provence with intentions of buying on speculation all the Cézannes he could get hold of, the peasantry, hearing that a fool from Paris was actually handing out money for old linen, produced from barns a considerable number of still-lifes and landscapes. The old master of Aix was overcome with joy, but recognition came too late. In 1906 he died from a fever contracted while painting in a downpour of rain.
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Chronology
Portrait of the Artist, 1873–1876.
Oil on canvas, 53 × 64 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
1839 – Paul Cézanne is born on January 19, in Aix-en-Provence.
1849–1851 – Studies as a half-boarder at the St. Joseph school together with Philippe Solari, the future sculptor, and Henri Gasquet.
1852–1858 Studies at the Collège Bourbon in Aix, with Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. Enrolls at the municipal school of drawing at the Aix Museum.
1859 – Studies law at Aix University and continues to attend the municipal school of drawing from November 1859 until August 1860. Sets up a studio at the Jas de Bouffan.
1861 – Leaves Aix for Paris. Works at the Académie Suisse, meets Armand Guillaumin and Camille Pissarro, and paints a portrait of Zola, destroying it unfinished. Returns to Aix in September and starts work in his father’s bank. Attends the municipal school of drawing in Aix.
1862 – Leaves the bank in January and devotes himself entirely to painting. In November he goes a second time to Paris and settles there.
1863 – Works at the Académie Suisse together with Antoine Guillemet, Guillaumin, and Francisco Oller. He and Zola visit the Salon and the Salon des Refusés.
1864 – Sends one of his works to the Salon, but the Jury rejects it. Copies a painting by Eugène Delacroix at the Louvre.
1866 – The Jury of the Salon rejects his portrait of Valabrègue (V. 126). Cézanne writes a letter of protest to Count Nieuwerkerke, chairman of the Beaux-Arts, with the demand that the Salon des Refusés be reopened. Zola’s articles published in the newspaper L’Événement in defence of avant-garde artists are issued in a separate pamphlet with a dedication to Cézanne.
1867 – His paintings Punch and Rum and Intoxication are rejected by the Salon. Zola defends him in the press (Figaro, April 12, 1867).
1869 – Meets Hortense Fiquet (b. 1850), who works at a bookbinder’s and also as a model. Once again rejected by the Salon.
1870 – After the declaration of the Franco-Prussian war, he works in Aix and later goes to L’Estaque, accompanied by Hortense Fiquet. Zola comes to stay with him for a short time. After the pronouncement of the Third Republic, his father is elected a member of the Municipal Council and Cézanne a member of the fine arts commission of the Aix school. However, he does not participate in the commission’s activities.
1872 – Birth of Paul, his son, by Hortense Fiquet. Cézanne moves with his family to Pontoise where he works with Pissarro.
1873 – Lives in Auvers-sur-Oise, working in the house of Dr. Gachet. Pissarro introduces him to Julien Tanguy, the art dealer.
1873 – Takes part in the first Impressionist exhibition (Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs), held from April 15 to May 15. He exhibits The House of the Hanged Man (V. 133), A Modern Olympia (V. 225), and the study Landscape at Auvers.
1876 – He refuses to send his works to the second Impressionist exhibition and in August returns to Paris.
1877 – Works with Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers, and also in Chantilly, Fontainebleau, and Issy.
1880 – In August he stays with Zola in Medan, meeting Joris Karl Huysmans.
1881 – Lives in Pontoise (but keeps his apartment in Paris) where he works with Pissarro and meets Paul Gauguin.
1882 – Admitted to the Salon as a “pupil of Guillemet.”
1883 – At the end of December he visits Claude Monet and Renoir. On May 4, he goes to the funeral of Édouard Manet.
1884 – The portrait he submits for the Salon is rejected by the panel, and from then onwards Cézanne apparently sends no more of his works to the Salon. Paul Signac buys one of his landscapes from Tanguy.
1886 – In March, Zola’s L’Œuvre is published. Breaks with Zola. On April 28, Cézanne marries Hortense Fiquet. In the summer he lives in Paris and in Hattenville. On October 23, his father dies, leaving him a legacy.
1887 – Exhibits in Brussels with “Les XX.”
1888 – In January Renoir stays with him in Aix and they work together.
1889 – Exhibits The House of the Hanged Man at Auvers at the World Exposition of 1889–1890.
1890 – In January he exhibits three paintings at the seventh exhibition of “Les XX” in Brussels, among them is The House of the Hanged Man at Auvers.
1894 – In the fall he visits Monet at Giverny where he meets Joseph Clemenceau, Auguste Rodin, Octave Mirbeau, Gustave Geffroy, and Mary Cassat.
1895 – Cézanne’s first personal exhibition is organized by Vollard on Rue Laffitte (150 works). Two of Cézanne’s landscapes are bequeathed by Gustave Caillebotte to the Musée de Luxembourg.
1897 – October 25, death of Cézanne’s mother. One of his landscapes is acquired by the National Gallery in Berlin as a gift from a Berlin patron of the arts.
1900 – His Vase of Fruit, Glass, and Apples (V. 341), Pool at the Jas de Bouffan (V. 167), and a landscape are displayed at the exhibition “A Century of French Art,” held at the World Exposition in Paris.
1901 – Denis exhibits Hommage à Cézanne at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français. Cézanne sends several paintings to the Exposition de la Libre Esthétique in Brussels and to the Salon des Indépendants. He builds a studio on Chemin des Lauves, not far from Aix.
