Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence and attended the local Collège Bourbon, where he met the writer Emile Zola. Cezanne enrolled at the École Municipale de Dessin and later went on to study law, in accordance with his father's wishes, at the Université d'Aix. Abandoning his law studies early, Cézanne moved to Paris in 1861 and began to paint with Camille Pissarro.

Consistently rejected by both the Paris Salon and various art schools, Cézanne returned to the south of France in 1870, a move which also allowed him to avoid conscription to the war with Prussia. There he began to study nature and to experiment with landscape painting. In 1872, Cézanne joined the ranks of the avant-garde and again worked closely with Pissarro before participating in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Cézanne's paintings were singled out for particularly harsh criticism by the French press, and he again retreated to Aix, where he focused on painting still lifes.

By the mid-1870s, Cézanne had moved on from still lifes and began to explore the theme of the bathers, completing some of his more major paintings. He paid regular visits to Pissarro, as well as to Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and Auguste Renoir in Northern France. Between 1882 and 1895 Cézanne turned away from Impressionism and began his radical and influential transformation of the physical forms of his subjects into a measured, weighty, and personal pictorial order. His intense and extended project focused on still lifes and landscape motifs, most notably the nearby Mount Sainte-Victoire. Towards the end of his life, Cézanne created many portraits and again returned to the theme of depicting bathers. These later paintings are often seen as foreshadows of Cubism, a movement which would come to regard Cézanne as a direct influence. Although several prominent collectors (including Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, Ambroise Vollard, and Paul Durand-Ruel) purchased Cézanne paintings during the artist's lifetime, his work was largely ignored or attacked while he was alive. In the late 1890s, his paintings began to be noticed by younger artists, such as Émile Bernard (1868-1941). Cézanne is now considered one of the masters of nineteenth-century painting and his paintings have been extremely influential for many artists of the twentieth century.