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Sunday 23 February 2014

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, in Provence in the South of France. Paul's father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne (1798 –1886), was the co-founder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance.


In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon (now Collège Mignet), where he met and became friends with future writer Émile Zola, who was in a less advanced class, as well as future professor of optics and acoustics Baptistin Baille. The three friends would come to be known as "les trois inséparables" (the three inseparables).

Going against the objections of his banker father, Cézanne committed himself to pursuing his artistic development and left Aix for Paris in 1861. He was strongly encouraged to make this decision by Zola, who was already living in the capital at the time.


Cézanne moved to Provence to evade military service during the Franco-Prussian War. There, he painted L'Estaque, Melting Snow (see below).


Paul Cézanne was 56-years-old when he had his first one-man exhibition.

Cézanne took a lot of criticism for his painting style, but taught his pet parrot to say “Paul Cézanne is a great painter”.

Cézanne's friendship with writer Emile Zola was wrecked when Zola used Cézanne as the model for a tragic, failed artist in his novel L'Ouevre.

It wasn’t much fun being a sitter for one of Paul Cézanne’s portraits. The notoriously irritable Frenchman demanded "you hold your pose like an apple" for hours on end. "Does an apple move?", he’d bawl if a subject so much as twitched.

He spent 17 years with his mistress and muse, Hortense Fiquet, whom he painted 27 times, before marrying her on April 28, 1886.

Fiquet was to live separately from her husband for much of their married life. After the death of Cézanne's father the pair separated, the artist moving in with his sister and mother and declaring, "My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade."

Hortense Cézanne in a Red Dress, c.1890

A devout Roman Catholic, Cézanne said, "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."

Cézanne died of pneumonia after being caught in a storm while working in a field.

The theft of Paul Cézanne's View of Auvers-sur-Oise from Oxford's Ashmolean Museum on January 1, 2000 used the noise of fireworks from the millennium celebrations as a distraction.

Sources Daily MailWikipedia 

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