Paul Cezanne - The Impressionist

Lesson 10 is to paint a bowl of fruit

It also asks to annotate with reference to Paul Cezanne

Who is Paul Cezanne?

This is a portrait of his father.

Looks like a normal portrait right?

Paul Cezanne (say ZAHN) was born in France. His father was a wealthy banker and he wanted his son to become a banker. He did not approve of Cezanne's plan to become an artist, but he went on to Paris anyway. After a while, his father sent him a small allowance on which to live.

When he got to Paris, his paintings were so rough that none of the official art schools would admit him as a student. At first his paintings were done in dark colours, but Pissarro, another painter, encouraged him to paint out in the sunlight, and his paintings came alive with bright colours.

He was an Impressionist, but his paintings did not have the light airy look of many Impressionists. Instead of putting flecks of paint on the canvas he put slabs of colour. His pictures were solid in appearance. Cezanne was a versatile artist. He painted many different subjects in multiple styles. Sometimes he painted the same subject over and over again. Look at the examples below. The first picture is a group portrait. He also painted individual portraits of men and women Cezanne considered shapes to be the basic forms; the sphere, cone, and cylinder. Look at the painting, Apples and Oranges at the top of this page and find these shapes in the fruit, the pitcher, and the bowl.

It was this aspect of Cézanne's analytical, time-based practice that led the future Cubists to regard him as their true mentor.

He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire many times in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The picture shown here shows a street in front of the Sainte-Victoire mountain. You can see others at Web Museum, Paris. Some of the pictures feature the mountain itself and others only have it in the background.

He did not like to be with other people and isolated himself, even from his friends. When he was 47 years old, his father died and he inherited his father's wealth.

Here are some facts about Paul Cezanne, the famous French Post-Impressionist painter.

Paul Cezanne was born on 19th January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, France

He is often credited with forming the bridge between the dominant style of painting in that late 19th century (Impressionism) and the trend towards Cubism in the early 20th century

Cezanne was born into a wealthy family. His father was a founding member of a successful banking firm, and Paul Cezanne never had to worry about money

He moved to Paris in 1861

In Paris, Cezanne met Camille Pissarro (an Impressionist painter). They formed a strong friendship and worked together on some pieces of artwork

Cezanne wanted to represent real life in simple forms. He explored using ‘geometric simplification’ and his work inspired Picasso and Matisse. They referred to Cezanne as ‘the father of us all’

Paul Cezanne died of pneumonia on 22nd October 1906 An exhibition of his work in Paris in 1907, the year after Cezanne’s death, exposed a new generation of artists to his work and techniques

Cezanne was a Roman Catholic and religious images often appeared in his early work

Cezanne painted a range of different subjects during his career, including: landscapes, still life and portraits

Cezanne painted slowly believing that he needed to truly observe and understand his subject matter before he could capture the moment with a brushstroke. His portrait might take him over 100 working sessions to complete

He complained that he could not paint pictures of people properly, and in fact his still lifes; pictures of objects in settings, became his best works.

Cezanne had a friend, Emile Zola, who had been his friend since they were children. Zola was a writer and wrote a novel about an artist who was a failure. Cezanne was not very well known at that time and he thought Zola had used him as a basis for his main character. Whether this was the case or not, he ended the friendship with Emile and the incident would affect the rest of his life.

He was not very successful until in 1895 when Vollard, an art dealer in Paris, exhibited his works and he began to enjoy the success for which he had longed.