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Learn about the painting by Cézanne, a master of still-life art, who rarely depicted flowering plants or fresh-cut bouquets. See how he used spherical geometry and white tablecloth to create a lush and solid world of apples and primroses.
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Ambroise Vollard La Vie et l'œuvre de Pierre-Auguste...
- Fantastic Scene
Paul Cézanne. 3rd ed., rev. and enl. Munich, 1910, ill. p....
- The House With The Cracked Walls
the artist (until ca. 1899, sold for Fr 350 through Paul...
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In his still-life paintings from the mid-1870s, Cézanne...
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- Overview
- Early life and work
- Impressionist years
Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter, whose works influenced the development of many 20th-century art movements, especially Cubism. Discredited by the public during most of his life, Cézanne challenged conventional values of painting in the 19th century, insisting on the integrity of the painting itself regardless of subject.
What is Paul Cézanne famous for?
Paul Cézanne is known for his search for solutions to problems of representation. Such landscapes as Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1902–06) have the radical quality of simultaneously representing deep space and flat design. He is also famous for his many still lifes and portraits, including Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (c. 1877).
What was Paul Cézanne’s family like?
Paul Cézanne was the son of a well-to-do bourgeois family. He hid from them his mistress, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, with whom he had a son, Paul, Jr. Cézanne married Fiquet 17 years after meeting her, but the couple often lived apart, and Cézanne excluded her from his will.
How was Paul Cézanne educated?
Cézanne was the son of a well-to-do bourgeois family. He received a classical education at the Collège Bourbon in Aix. In 1858, under the direction of his father—a successful banker determined to have his son enter the same profession—Cézanne entered the law school of the University of Aix-en-Provence. He had no taste for the law, however, having decided at an early age to pursue some kind of artistic career, and after two years he persuaded his father, with the support of his mother’s entreaties, to allow him to study painting in Paris.
Cézanne’s first stay in Paris lasted only five months. The instability of his personality gave way to severe depression almost immediately when he found that he was not as proficient technically as some of the students at the Académie Suisse, the studio where he began his instruction. He stayed as long as he did only because of the encouragement of the writer Émile Zola, with whom he had formed a close friendship at the Collège Bourbon. Returning to Aix, Cézanne made a new attempt to content himself with working at his father’s bank, but after a year he returned to Paris with strengthened resolution to stay. During his formative period, from about 1858 to 1872, Cézanne alternated between living in Paris and visiting Aix.
The early 1860s was a period of great vitality for Parisian literary and artistic activity. The conflict had reached its height between the Realist painters, led by Gustave Courbet, and the official Académie des Beaux-Arts, which rejected from its annual exhibition—and thus from public acceptance—all paintings not in the academic Neoclassical or Romantic styles. In 1863 the emperor Napoleon III decreed the opening of a Salon des Refusés to counter the growing agitation in artistic circles over painters refused by the Salon of the Académie. The works of the Refusés were almost universally denounced by critics—a reaction that consolidated the revolutionary spirit of these painters. Cézanne, whose tastes had soon shifted away from the academic, became associated with the most advanced members of this group, including Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. Most of these artists were only in their 20s (as was Cézanne) and were just forming their styles; they were to become, with the exception of Manet, the Impressionist school. Cézanne’s friend Zola was passionately devoted to their cause, but Cézanne’s friendship with the other artists was at first inhibited by his touchiness and deliberate rudeness, born of extreme shyness and a moodiness that was offended by their convivial ways. Nevertheless, he was inspired by their revolutionary spirit as he sought to synthesize the influences of Courbet, who pioneered the unsentimental treatment of commonplace subjects, and of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose compositions, emphasizing colour instead of line, greatly impressed Cézanne.
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During this period Cézanne began to develop a style that was violent and dark; he painted scenes with harsh extremes of light and shadow and with a looseness and vigour that are remarkable for the time but that can be traced to the influence of Delacroix’s swirling compositions. The sensitive dynamism of this youthful period, with the inner feverishness that it reveals, foreshadows the daring innovations of Fauvism and of modern Expressionism, particularly the works of Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Rouault.
In July 1870, with the outbreak of the Franco-German War, Cézanne left Paris for Provence, partly to avoid being drafted. He took with him Marie-Hortense Fiquet, a young woman who had become his mistress the previous year and whom he married in 1886. The Cézannes settled at Estaque, a small village on the coast of southern France, not far from Marseille. There he began to paint landscapes, exploring ways to depict nature faithfully and at the same time to express the feelings it inspired in him. He began to approach his subjects the way his Impressionist friends did; in two landscapes from this time, Snow at Estaque (1870–71) and The Wine Market (1872), the composition is that of his early style, but already more disciplined and more attentive to the atmospheric, rather than dramatic, quality of light.
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In January 1872 Marie-Hortense gave birth to a son. Soon afterward, at the invitation of Camille Pissarro, Cézanne took his family to live at Pontoise in the valley of the Oise River. There and at the nearby town of Auvers he began seriously to learn the techniques and theories of Impressionism from Pissarro, who of his painter friends was the only one patient enough to teach him despite his difficult personality. The two artists painted together intermittently through 1874, taking their canvases all over the countryside and painting out-of-doors, a technique that was still considered radical. From this time on, Cézanne was to devote himself almost exclusively to landscapes, still lifes, and, later, portraits. Pissarro persuaded Cézanne to lighten his colours and showed him the advantages of using the broken bits of colour and short brushstrokes that were the trademark of the Impressionists and that Cézanne came to use regularly, although with a different effect, in his later work. Even while under Pissarro’s guidance, however, Cézanne painted pictures clearly indicating that his vision was unique and that his purpose was quite different from that of the Impressionists. Although he used the techniques of these young artists, he did not share their concern with emphasizing the objective vision presented by the light emanating from an object; rather, his explorations emphasized the underlying structure of the objects he painted. Already he was composing with cubic masses and architectonic lines; his strokes, unlike those of the Impressionists, were not strewn with colour, but they complemented each other in a chromatic unity. His most famous painting of this period, The House of the Suicide (1873), illustrates these forces at work.
Learn how to create your own still life painting inspired by Paul Cézanne's works. Explore his studio, his objects, and his colors in this interactive lesson for 9-12 grade students.
In this work the artist demonstrates that a still life can be more than an imitation of life—it can be an exploration of seeing and of the very nature of painting. Never aiming for mere illusion, Cézanne consistently drew attention to the quality of the paint and canvas.
Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants. Paul Cézanne French. 1893–94. On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 826. For this commanding still life, with its richly orchestrated play of overlapping shapes, patterns, colors, and textures, Cézanne relied on a stock of familiar objects.
Throughout his life, the French painter Paul Cézanne returned again and again to the still life. Encompassing small—scale domestic scenes rather than grand public ones, still life was...
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