Biography of Paul Cézanne

The wonders of geometry

19 January 1839
October 22, 1906
The painter Paul Cezanne was born in Aix en Provence (France) on 19 January 1839 from a prosperous family. He studied law, but abandoned them to follow the artistic vocation. Followed before the courses at the École de Dessin in Aix and then studied in Paris, at the Académie Suisse. It was rejected by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, for a few years, he lived between Aix and Paris, where he became friends with other famous painters and artists that match the names of Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille. At first did not show interest in the pictorial renewal of the Impressionists and painted until 1873 works related again to the romantic tradition, such as "pain" and "the donkey and the thieves". Many of these works are distinguished by their dark tones, for heavy mixtures of color as "the negro Scipio". During the franco-Prussian War of 1870 he moved with Hortense Fiquet, his model and then wife, in Estaque, in Provence. In 1873 he painted "The hanged man's House in Auvers", a work that marked the beginning of the Impressionist painter.
The failure at exhibitions of Impressionist group marked the final detachment of Cézanne and his life was characterized by numerous journeys through France, from which he drew inspiration for his numerous landscapes painted during this period. From 1883 he retired to Provence, focusing on finding a technique to take distance from the Impressionist to enhance, through color, massing in the shape. In these years he revised persistently the same themes: visions of the Estaque, the Sainte-Victoire mountain, the many still lifes, portraits of his wife "Madame Cezanne in a yellow armchair", patterns of everyday life, the compositions of swimmers.
Only in the 1990s and in the early 20th century, though, the critics recognized the value of his work: the solo exhibition of 1895 was the first real triumph for the artist, and a hit was also the exhibition at the Salon d'Automne of 1904. By 1900, man with diabetes, was almost always in Aix-en-Provence. In the last years of his life working in The large bathers (1898-1905), summary of studies that had accumulated over the previous 10 years.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.