Paul Cezanne Biography Quotes 44 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Paul Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, the son of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, a self-made banker, and Anne-Elisabeth Honorine Aubert. The family rose from modest origins to local prominence, and the father's ambitious temperament shaped the young artist's life, alternating between discipline and the financial security that later enabled Cezanne's perseverance. Cezanne attended the College Bourbon (later Lycee Mignet), where he formed a close friendship with the future novelist Emile Zola and the scientist Baptistin Baille. With Zola, he shared long walks and debates about literature and art; the two imagined careers in Paris that would remake the culture of their time.

Following his father's wishes, Cezanne enrolled in law studies in Aix while taking drawing lessons at the local school. His passion for painting, nourished by copying Old Masters and sketching the Provençal landscape, steadily eclipsed legal ambitions. After much tension, his father grudgingly granted him a small allowance, and in 1861 Cezanne left for Paris, joining Zola there in pursuit of an artistic life.

Paris and First Attempts
In Paris, Cezanne studied at the Academie Suisse, a loosely structured studio that welcomed independent talents and where he encountered young painters who would shape his path. He submitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but was turned away, an early sign that his temperament and handling diverged from academic norms. He spent hours at the Louvre, copying Titian, Rubens, and Poussin, learning composition from the Old Masters while absorbing the modernity stirring around him.

His early canvases were thickly painted, often dark in tone, indebted to Gustave Courbet's realism and Eugene Delacroix's expressive color. He painted ambitious allegories and figures with a rugged, sometimes turbulent touch, searching for a language equal to his intensity. The Paris Salon rejected him repeatedly, a ritual of disappointment that pushed him toward circles outside official approval.

Friendships and the Impressionist Circle
Around the mid-1860s Cezanne met Camille Pissarro, who became both friend and mentor. Pissarro's counsel encouraged painting directly before nature and opened Cezanne to lighter color and a more patient observation of forms. Through Pissarro he moved among Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Edouard Manet, the painters whose experiments were drawing battle lines with the academic establishment. Cezanne exhibited in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and again in 1877. The critical response to his contributions was often harsh, and he received little public support, yet the experience clarified his determination to pursue his own path.

In 1872, 1874 he worked closely with Pissarro at Pontoise and Auvers-sur-Oise. Under Pissarro's steady example, his palette brightened and his brushwork became more considered. Dr. Paul Gachet, the physician and friend to many artists, welcomed him in Auvers and provided a hospitable setting for work and exchange.

Hortense Fiquet and Family
Cezanne's private life was tightly interwoven with the fortunes of his art. He met Hortense Fiquet in the late 1860s; she was his companion and model for decades and the mother of his son, Paul, born in 1872. For years he kept the relationship hidden from his father, fearing the loss of financial support. The secrecy burdened the household and contributed to Cezanne's alternation between Paris and Provence. In 1886, the year he married Hortense, his father died, leaving him a secure inheritance. That same year brought an emotional break with Emile Zola after the publication of Zola's novel L'Oeuvre, whose portrayal of a doomed painter Cezanne felt cut too close to their shared past.

Working in Provence and the Northern Suburbs
Though he kept links to Paris, Cezanne increasingly returned to Provence and to the family estate at the Jas de Bouffan outside Aix. He painted its plane trees, avenues, and mirrored pond, testing shifting geometries and rhythms of color. He also worked at L'Estaque near Marseille, where the brilliance of Mediterranean light and the interlocking planes of sea, hills, and houses helped him develop a new sense of structure. He continued to revisit the northern suburbs with Pissarro, painting in Pontoise and Auvers in the 1870s, but by the 1880s his art grew more solitary and rooted in the terrain of the south.

Technique, Motifs, and Innovations
Cezanne sought to reconcile the solidity of classical art with the immediacy of modern vision. He developed a measured, constructive brushstroke that built forms through modulated touches of color. Rather than outline objects, he allowed warm and cool hues to advance and recede, establishing volume and depth without conventional modeling. His still lifes with apples, ginger jars, and patterned cloths, with tabletops that tilt and edges that subtly misalign, explored the tension between perception and pictorial order. The series of Mont Sainte-Victoire, painted from different vantage points around Aix, became a lifelong meditation on how to translate nature into enduring architectonics. Arcadian figures in The Bathers culminated this pursuit, uniting landscape and figure in a monumental equilibrium.

Cezanne's famous formulation to younger painters, expressed in letters, urged them to treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, organizing the whole by perspective lines while remaining faithful to sensation. This balance between disciplined construction and sensitive seeing made his work a cornerstone for the next generation.

Dealers, Collectors, and Critical Reception
Despite early neglect, a few allies recognized his talent. Auguste Renoir encouraged the collector Victor Choquet, who acquired important canvases in the 1870s. The dealer Ambroise Vollard gave Cezanne his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1895, a turning point that introduced his work to new audiences and to younger artists hungry for alternatives to Impressionism. Paul Durand-Ruel, a champion of the Impressionists, also took interest in his work, though Vollard remained the key figure in Cezanne's late career. Through these channels, paintings reached private collections where they were studied with growing admiration.

Break with Zola and Later Correspondence
The rupture with Emile Zola in 1886 ended a friendship that had shaped Cezanne's youth, yet it coincided with his artistic consolidation. In later years he found interlocutors in younger painters and writers. He corresponded with Emile Bernard, sharing reflections on color, form, and method, and he discussed art passionately with Joachim Gasquet in Aix. Maurice Denis, a leading figure among the Nabis, saw in Cezanne a guide to a renewed classicism grounded in modern color.

Late Years, Atelier des Lauves, and Death
From the 1890s onward Cezanne worked increasingly in and around Aix. In 1902 he built the Atelier des Lauves on a hill north of the town, a luminous studio designed to accommodate his large canvases and his cherished still-life props. From its windows and nearby paths he found new prospects on Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he painted in a sequence of increasingly abstracted structures of color.

Cezanne's health waned in his final years, but his dedication never softened. In October 1906, while painting outdoors, he was caught by a sudden storm and collapsed. He died in Aix shortly afterward and was buried in the Saint-Pierre cemetery. His passing was followed by tributes that recognized the magnitude of his achievement.

Legacy and Influence
The 1907 retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in Paris presented a broad survey of his work and confirmed his stature. Younger artists found in his canvases a new grammar: volume built by color, pictorial space constructed from interlocking planes, nature translated into steady, architectonic order. Henri Matisse studied his color and balance; Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque drew crucial lessons for Cubism from his still lifes and views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Picasso would later call him the father of us all, acknowledging a debt shared across modern art. The critic Roger Fry's 1910 exhibition in London, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, spread Cezanne's influence beyond France and gave a name to the movement his work helped to anchor.

For all the later acclaim, Cezanne's career was marked by persistence rather than applause. The support of figures like Pissarro, Renoir, Choquet, and Vollard, the companionship and trials shared with Hortense Fiquet and their son, and the formative friendship with Emile Zola together frame a life devoted to finding in paint a durable equivalent to what the eye sees and the mind knows. Standing between tradition and modernity, Cezanne forged a method that changed painting from the inside, making possible much of 20th-century art.

Our collection contains 44 quotes who is written by Paul, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - Art - Nature - Aging.

Other people realated to Paul: Rainer Maria Rilke (Poet), Gertrude Stein (Author), Emile Zola (Novelist), Paul Gauguin (Artist), Bridget Riley (Artist), Georges Braque (Artist), William S. Paley (Businessman), Octave Mirbeau (Writer), Ben Nicholson (Artist), Clive Bell (Critic)