The following year, Cézanne moved to the capital to study at the Academie Suisse, where he met the artist Camille Pissarro who influenced Cézanne’s practice, style and methods.
When Paul Cezanne moved from Aix-en-Provence to Paris in 1862 his art was heavily influenced by Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet. Paul Cezanne may now be considered one of the most famous painters of the 19th century but he did not always have that reputation today. Cézanne’s masterful still lifes, landscapes and portraits are known for their ineffable alchemy.
French post-impressionist painter Paul Cezanne is best known for his incredibly diverse painting style which greatly influenced abstract art in the 20th century. It is believed that the work of the French post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne forged a bridge between the impressionism of the late 19th century and the new line of art research of early 20th century cubism.
In this period, Cézanne began to develop a violent and somber style, he painted scenes with harsh extremes of light and shadows, with fluidity and energy, remarkable for the time, but which can be traced back to Delacroix’s rotating compositions. He was a great influence on Paul Cézanne and had a time with him in 1872.
Also in the 1870s and until 1885, Cézanne began painting in Lestac, a place that was rightly considered a stimulus to Cézanne’s creative maturity. From the mid-1880s to the first personal exhibition of Cézanne in 1895, organized by his merchant Ambroise Vollard in Paris, the artist’s personal life and work underwent significant changes.
Cézanne’s method of working stems from his intention to create paintings that reflect solid form rather than the elusive effects of the Impressionists, and he painted almost daily producing over 2,000 works on paper during his career, mostly done in pencil and watercolors on notebook pages and single sheets, these works showcase Cézanne’s technical range.
In Mont Sainte-Victoire, the artist depicts one of the most recognizable monuments of Provence which is present in about 100 of his drawings and paintings. Among his most iconic works are his paintings of card players from the early 1890s and the careers of Biebem and Chateau Noir from the mid-1890s. Cezanne was also influenced initially by his Impressionist contemporaries including Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir.
After 1874, however, Cézanne participated in only one Impressionist exhibition – the third in 1877 in which he presented 16 paintings. Cézanne’s paintings were exhibited in 1863 at the first Salon of Refusals exhibition, which featured works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. In the same year he exhibited Portrait de MLA, probably Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the father of artists reading LEvenement, 1866 (
This early stage of Cézanne’s career is filled with dark portraits and emotionally charged scenes, reflecting the artist’s initial duty to Gustave Courbet, whose work he met in Paris, as well as a traditionally provencal appreciation for his energetic manipulation of painting.
In the 1860s, Cézanne’s work was more distinctive and had practically no trace of his more refined and mature style of painting – for example hints of melancholy and religious images in his masterpieces – and in the portrait of Viktor Chok (1875).
Cézanne’s early works often take an interest in figures in a landscape and include many paintings with groups of large and heavy figures in a landscape painted in a creative way later in his career, developing a light and airy style of painting, but in the mature work of Cezanne there is a development of an established, almost architectural style of painting: he used colored planes and small strokes that accumulated to form complex fields.
At the same time, he exaggerates the slope of the sideboard to emphasize the two-dimensional nature of the surface of the images. The result reflects the material weight of objects that life encounters and exposes the reality of the composition as a work of art.
Although he is often referred to as a painter, Cézanne was also a skilled draftsman, the atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was part of the sensation he was painting.
Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence on January 19th, 1839 (also known as Aix), France. His father (1798-1886), a native of Saint-Zachary (Var), was co-founder of a banking company (Banque Cezanne et Cabassol) which flourished throughout the artist’s life, offering financial security not accessible to most of his contemporaries. It eventually turned into a wonderful legacy.
