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15. Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1896–1898.

Oil on canvas, 78 × 99 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Paul Cézanne is considered an artist of the Post-Impressionism era, although he was a contemporary and friend of the Impressionists. Those contemporaries rightfully counted him among the Impressionists – Cézanne had exhibited with the Impressionists at the first 1874 exhibition, consequently, even the critic Leroy branded him, as he did the others, with this label. While working alongside Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, who were his friends all his life, Cézanne appraised their painting critically and followed his own, independent path. The Impressionists’ aspiration to copy nature objectively did not satisfy him. “One must think”, he said, ‘the eye is not enough, thinking is also necessary”.[5] Cézanne’s own system of painting was born in a dispute with Impressionism.

Paul Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839, in the city of Aix-en-Provence, where his father had founded a bank. At the Age of thirteen, his father sent him to boarding school at Bourbon College, where Paul studied for six years.

These years would have been rather unhappy had he not made friends at the College. A boy from a poor family, Émile Zola, the dynamic excellent student Jean-Baptiste Baille and the shy Paul Cézanne became an inseparable trio.

In Aix there was also a free drawing school, where Cézanne began to busy himself in the evenings from 1858 on. But, his father had linked his son’s future with the bank; however, Paul rebelled against it from the very beginning.

In 1859, Cézanne’s father bought an estate near Aix. Jas de Bouffan, which in the Provencal dialect means, “Home of the Winds” was situated on a small rise and had vineyards. At the time of Louis XIV, it had been the palace of the Provence governor. The living rooms of the ancient house were repaired and Paul installed a studio upstairs. He came to love this place and often painted the deserted park, the lane of old nut trees and the pool with the stone dolphins. In his letters, Zola persistently demonstrated his faith in his friend’s talent as an artist and invited his friend to Paris: “You must satisfy your father by studying law as assiduously as possible. But you must also work seriously on drawing.”[6] Paul’s father was obstinate, but, finally, he gave in, not having lost hope that his son would change his mind. Paul was able to abandon law and leave for Paris to take up painting. Finally, in 1861, Paul’s father himself took the future artist to Paris and promised to send him 250 francs every month.

In the novel L’Œuvre, Zola endows his hero with the young Cézanne’s appearance such as it was when he showed up in Paris: “A skinny boy, with knobbly joints, a stubborn spirit and a bearded face…”[7] This is how Cézanne also appears in the self-portraits of his Parisian youth: a beard, which covered the lower part of his face, forcefully sculpted cheekbones, and a serious, sharp stare.

Paris life did not spoil Cézanne. The joy of meeting with Zola, their first excursions together to the museums, and walks around the city and its suburbs gave way to the harsh regimen of work. Most of all, Cézanne went to the Swiss Academy on the Ile de la Cité.

16. Paul Cézanne, Girl at the Piano (The Ouverture to Tannhäuser), 1868.

Oil on canvas, 57.8 × 92.5 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

17. Paul Cézanne, Achille Emperaire, c. 1868–1870.

Oil on canvas, 200 × 120 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

But he missed Aix, its valleys and the Mont Sainte-Victoire, and the friends he left behind. Paris disappointed him. But chiefly, he was constantly dissatisfied with himself.

Cézanne found many friends at the Swiss Academy and friends they remained.

Pissarro immediately appreciated Cézanne’s boldness and ingenuity. Very likely, Armand Guillaumin, who later exhibited with the Impressionists, introduced them. Then Pissarro brought Cézanne to his friends – Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille. In that same 1866, Cézanne became acquainted with Édouard Manet – through the mediation of mutual acquaintances, he obtained permission to visit Manet’s studio. After his visit, the master himself arrived at Guillaumin’s studio to see Paul’s still lives that were there. Cézanne always sensed the distance that separated him, a provincial painter just starting out, from the elegant, worldly Parisian, Manet. However, by virtue of his stubborn, cocky nature, he flaunted his own coarse provincialism.

Cézanne, like all artists, wanted to show his paintings, and this meant exhibiting at the Salon. He carried his canvases on a hand truck and impatiently awaited the jury’s decision, although he understood that his painting could not be accepted.

Cézanne only succeeded in showing his canvases to the public for the first time at the first exhibition of Impressionists in 1874.

Cézanne’s painting constantly surprised not only the jury, but also those artists who regarded him kindly. Once, when he was working ‘en plein air’, the landscape painter, Charles-François D’Aubigny, who lived in Auvers, saw him. However, it was not within his power to win over the jury.

When Cézanne was painting with his friends – the Impressionists – the difference between their works was striking. The motifs of his landscapes are those same banks of the Seine which Claude Monet, Sisley and Pissarro painted. Monet fragmented the colours of the trees and their reflections in the water into a multitude of minute flecks of pure colour, achieving impressions of movement and his colours radiated the sunlight. Cézanne, on the contrary, selected a single, conventional, sufficiently dark greenish blue with which he painted both the water and the bank of the Marne. He needed colour only to extrapolate volume. The effect proved to be directly the opposite of the impressionistic: the smooth river was absolutely still and not a single leaf fluttered on the trees, which stood out on the canvas like dense rounded masses.

18. Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Louis Auguste Cézanne, the Artist’s Father, 1866.

Oil on canvas, 198.5 × 119.3 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

19. Paul Cézanne, Pastoral (Idyll), 1870.

Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

However, it was impossible to reproach Cézanne for negligence with ‘plein air’ – he had been working and shaping his art along with the Impressionists. The same as they, he even imparted huge significance to the observation of nature.

Cézanne thought that one of the most difficult tasks for an artist was to know how to see in nature what an ordinary, unsophisticated observer was in no condition to see, not only the object itself, but the environment almost imperceptible by the human eye.

Indeed, in Cézanne’s opinion, the painter is supposed to catch in the life around him not a momentary transient impression; its theme is nature eternal and unchanging, such as it was created by God.

This constitutes Cézanne’s second thesis. The rough nature of the Impressionists’ pictures was unsuitable for the resolution of this task. Their composition did not seem to have been thought out earlier, and they bore in themselves the reflection of that very same chance of impression to which they aspired.

20. Paul Cézanne, Luncheon on the Grass, c. 1870–1871.

Private collection, Paris.

Cézanne constructed all of his own canvases, whether a landscape, a still life or a figurative picture, according to the rules of classical composition. Any fragment of nature was for Cézanne the embodiment of the world’s eternity, the most intimate motif became a cause for the creation of a monumental painting.

His Great Pine near Aix, the favourite pine tree of his happy childhood, shows an impressionistic joy of life. The floating, blurred splotches of colour in the background create a sensation of heated air. However, the picture was constructed according to a strict geometric scheme: the trunk of the pine became the core of the composition, the spreading branches made up its frame. The green of the crown combined with the blue of the sky and the gold of the sunlight embody the colour basis of the world’s beauty. Each of Cézanne’s landscapes approaches his ideal, according to his own words, “We must become classic again through nature.” However, observation of nature, for Cézanne, was only a part of the process for creating a painting. “Imagine Poussin completely reconstructed from nature, that’s what I mean by classic,” he said.[8]

21. Paul Cézanne, The House of the Hanged Man, 1873.

Oil on canvas, 55 × 66 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

22. Paul Cézanne, Quartier Four, Auvers-sur-Oise (Landscape, Auvers), c. 1873.

Oil on canvas, 46.3 × 55.2 cm.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

23. Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia, c. 1873.

Oil on canvas, 46 × 55.5 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Cézanne often painted outdoors in Provence. Sometimes artist friends called on him, and they worked together. Simultaneously, he worked on sketches in his studio in Jas de Bouffan, not one of which has been preserved. It is possible that Cézanne, who as before had been dissatisfied with himself, destroyed them. His father still hoped that Paul would give up painting, and he threw every obstacle in his way, and Paul was reduced to despair. “I am here with my family,” Nonetheless, his father continued to support Paul with money. Paul’s mother and sisters, judging by his letters from Aix, modelled for him more than once. In the 1860s, Paul created in Jas de Bouffan one of his best paintings, which was dedicated to Wagner – Girl at the Piano. (The Ouverture to Tannhäuser).

24. Paul Cézanne, The Eternal Woman, c. 1877.

Oil on canvas, 43 × 53 cm.

Private collection, New York.

Cézanne portrayed one of his sisters playing the piano, and his mother, or another sister, sitting on a divan with needlework in her hands. In essence, it would have been possible to ascribe this painting to genre painting; however, there is no development of the subject in it; as Édouard Manet, and as all his impressionist friends, Cézanne was against literature in his painting. Cézanne had created a monumental picture based on an everyday motif. The composition had been constructed according to the best classical standards. A specific area of the room was confined from two sides as side scenes: the piano and an armchair in the shape of the letter ‘L’. The limit of the divan’s back forms a vertical axis in the centre. The figures of the women are at an equal distance from the axis. Movement is completely absent in the picture, the characters are frozen, like mannequins. In the painting of the impressionist Renoir, white clothing vibrated with a multitude of blue, green and rose hues. Cézanne paints his sister’s dress with huge strokes of pure whites; colour is completely absent in the grey shadows.

The extrapolation in Cézanne’s painting gradually became bolder, the strokes, coarser. Changes of colour were of no interest to him; he was communicating those qualities of the subject that are permanent: volume and form.

25. Paul Cézanne, The Estaque, c. 1878–1879.

Oil on canvas, 59.5 × 73 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

26. Paul Cézanne, Trees in a Park (The Jas de Bouffan), 1885–1887.

Oil on canvas, 72 × 91 cm.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

27. Paul Cézanne, Pierrot and Arlequin (Shrove Tuesday), 1888–1890.

Oil on canvas, 102 × 81 cm.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

28. Paul Cézanne, Harlequin, c. 1888–1889.

Oil on canvas, 92 × 65 cm.

Rothschild Collection, Cambridge.

In the middle of the 1860s, Cézanne did a great deal of portraits in Aix. He attempted to paint outdoors the friends of his youth, Antoine Marion and Antonin Valabrègue – who later became an art critic. Dominic, his grandfather sat for Cézanne many times. Playing on his name, Paul portrayed Dominic as a Dominican monk, in a white monk’s habit. He painted forcefully, often applying colour with a palette knife, dividing colours with a black outline, exploring different means of expression.

At the same time, the portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the artist’s father, was painted reading the newspaper L’Évènement. The figure of his father possesses those characteristic features which make him meaningful. However, reproducing the volume, which mattered to him very much, was provided by a style of painting he had discovered.

The portrait of Achille Emperaire was also painted in the 1860s. This strange character was also one of Cézanne’s close friends. Emperaire was fascinated with art and loved painting. In Paris he and Cézanne walked around the Louvre, admiring Rubens and the Venetians. Cézanne painted Achille’s portrait in Aix. He depicted his model in a dressing gown and sat him in the same armchair in which he had painted his father.

At the end of the 1860s, Cézanne was in a state of agonising quests. On the one hand, he was full of respect for the masters of the past, for the classics. At the same time, he was convinced that their way was not suitable for him; outdoors, and only the outdoors, is exactly what an artist of his time needs. His conversation with Pissarro convinced him to a great extent. He states in a letter to Zola, “But, you see! All indoors, studio painting will never match those done outdoors”.[9] He painted views of the Aix vicinity, the valley with the aqueduct and Mont Sainte-Victoire, usually from a height, from which they had viewed the landscape during their childhood outings. He once more offered his landscapes, portraits and nudes for the Salon jury’s verdict, and once more they did not accept them.

The events of the Paris Commune and the Franco-Prussian War did not find any appreciable reflection in Cézanne’s works and life.

Many meaningful events occurred for him during these years of his life. He had very likely met Marie-Hortense Fiquet as early as 1869. The beautiful brunette with a classical face had shown up at Cézanne’s studio as a model.

Life with Hortense brought Paul new difficulties; he had to conceal her existence from his father because he was able to deprive Paul of his cash allowance.

Simultaneously, he painted a picture with bathers, Pastoral (Idyll), and a harsh, violent composition under the name of The Murder. Magdalene or Grief, suffering, full of passion and painted in a sharp expressive stroke, belongs to this same series of pictures. These pictures can be called narrative only in relation to the others. They were most likely his reflection on life, an outlet for his own passions and in a way a tribute to Symbolism. A Modern Olympia was the conclusion of this cycle.

29. Paul Cézanne, Bathers, c. 1890–1892.

Oil on canvas, 60 × 82 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

It is well known that, while discussing Manet’s Olympia, with a friend of the Impressionists, Doctor Gachet, Cézanne declared, “I can also do something similar to Olympia.” Gachet replied: “Well, do it.” So his canvas could be perceived as a kind of parody of Manet’s painting; there are many common components: the black-skinned servant as well as the flowers. It is, however, a protest aimed at the respected master; yet another of Cézanne’s arguments in his constant battle against Impressionism and against Manet. In comparison to Manet’s cold, elegant, model Victorine Meurent, Cézanne’s Olympia, curled into a ball in a ray of dazzling light, embodies a bundle of passions and, very likely, his personal drama. And the artist himself, enveloped in the smoke of a water pipe, contemplates her, like a spectator would the actress on the stage. Nevertheless, it was through the scandal caused by A Modern Olympia during the first exhibition of the Impressionists that Cézanne first became famous.

30. Paul Cézanne, The Bather, c. 1885.

Oil on canvas, 127 × 96.8 cm.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

31. Paul Cézanne, The Smoker, 1890–1892.

Oil on canvas, 92.5 × 73.5 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

32. Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, c. 1890–1895.

Oil on canvas, 47.5 × 57 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

He displayed there a number of canvases, but one of the most important critics of that time wrote that it was impossible to imagine a jury that would agree to accept Cézanne’s works. A comparatively liberal female journalist, hiding behind the pseudonym Marc de Montifaud, called A Modern Olympia the work of a mad man suffering from delirium tremens; a picture in which “a nightmare is represented as a sensual vision.” The opinions on Cézanne’s painting did not seem so awful against the overall background of criticism. The exhibition brought gratification, too; the collector Count Doria bought a landscape entitled The House of the Hanged Man, which was called an “appalling daub” in Leroy’s celebrated article.

However, after all these insults and derision, Cézanne retreated to Aix leaving Hortense and her son, the young Paul, who was born in 1872, in Paris.

During the third exhibition of the Impressionists in 1877, Cézanne was honoured with special attention of the Charivari critic Louis Leroy, who singled him out as the target of his most subtle insults. Paul exhibited canvases typical of the genres he preferred at that time: landscapes, portraits, some still lifes and bathers. Toward the end of the 1870s, bathers became the symbol of his figurative compositions. Cézanne’s work featured less and less narrative pictures, preferring more and more objects and motifs.

At the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s, Cézanne lived much of the time in Paris and worked in the area, in Melun or Médan-sur-Seine, at Zola’s. Thus he sometimes painted the banks of the Oise, the Auvers or the Pontoise where Pissarro lived. He could be sometimes seen in Normandy. Needless to say Cézanne regularly returned to his native Provence, as he was too attached to his roots. His principal difficulty at this time was his relationship with his family and the need to hide from his father the existence of his son and Hortense whom he could not resolve to marry. Despite all his contrivances, his father eventually found out about the grandchild’s existence.

The year 1886 was an extraordinary one in Cézanne’s life. The publication of Zola’s L’Œuvre was a shock to all the artists of the Impressionists’ circle.

The publication of L’Œuvre meant for Cézanne the end of a lifelong friendship with Zola. The character of Claude Lantier in L’Œuvre a failure who did not succeed in realising his ambitions, deeply annoyed him. On April 4, 1886, Cézanne wrote to Zola to thank him for the book, which he had not yet had the time to read. This was the last letter they sent each other. Zola’s novel was one of the reasons for Cézanne’s fleeing Paris. He was afraid that all his acquaintances would see in him the hero of L’Œuvre.

On the other hand, the problems of Cézanne’s family life solved themselves one after the other that year. In the spring of 1886, on the advice of his mother and sister Marie, Cézanne officially married Hortense at the Aix town hall. His son, Paul, was fourteen years old, and the matrimonial relations between him and Hortense were, in fact, dead. In October, at the age of eighty-eight, Louis-Auguste Cézanne died, and Paul inherited from him nearly 400,000 francs. The artist was thus able to settle all his debts and no longer needed to worry about his livelihood. Painting remained the only thing in his life.

Cézanne henceforth worked most of his time in Aix, rarely going to Paris. He refused to be exhibited, even with the Independents, where there was no jury. Gradually his circle of contacts became extremely narrow, the Paris of the arts almost forgot the strange Provençal.

33. Paul Cézanne, Woman with a Coffee Pot, c. 1890–1895.

Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 96.5 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

34. Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1899.

Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm.

Petit Palais – Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris.

35. Paul Cézanne, Woman in Blue, 1898–1899.

Oil on canvas, 88.5 × 72 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

36. Paul Cézanne, Apples and Oranges, c. 1895–1900.

Oil on canvas, 74 × 93 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

37. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Curtain, 1895.

Oil on canvas, 55 × 74.5 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

In 1895, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, recently established in Paris, decided on a risky experiment: he resolved to organise an exhibition of Cézanne’s works in his gallery at 39, rue Lafitte. Cézanne agreed to the exhibition and sent Vollard nearly 150 rolled pictures from Aix. They were paintings from all the periods of his work. The large number of works was an expression of his appreciation for the recognition that he no longer expected from his contemporaries. Cézanne was right to trust Vollard although the task was difficult for the latter. For the first time the Vollard exhibition allowed Cézanne to demonstrate the path along which he had travelled and the results he had achieved. The Impressionists rejoiced. Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien: “My admiration is nothing compared to Renoir’s delight. Even Degas fell under the spell of this refined barbarian. Monet too, and all of us… really, could we have been mistaken? I don’t think so.”[10] The critics, on the whole, were horrified. However, the editor of the magazine Revue blanche, Thadée Nathanson, wrote that Cézanne was an original and obstinate creator. The critic appreciated the fact that Cézanne concentrated on one single aim and that he knowingly pursued it. He said, shortly before his death: “I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art found in museums.”[11]