French artist who did not have his first one-man show until he was age 56. In the following decade, he was acknowledged as one of the brilliant contributors to the world of art, becoming an important influence on the 20th century creative process. He is considered the spiritual father of Impressionism. (Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are said to have remarked that C‚zanne “is the father of us all”).
The son of a self-made businessman, Louis-Auguste C‚zanne and lisabeth Aubert, Paul and his sister, Marie (1841) were born out of wedlock. His parents legitimized their union in 1844; ten years later lisabeth gave birth to a second daughter, Rose. Louis-Auguste had established himself as a hat seller where he met lisabeth in his employ. After Aix’s only bank failed after the 1848 revolution, Louis-Auguste acquired it. C‚zanne’s closest boyhood friend, the future novelist mile Zola, described Paul’s father as “?bourgeois, cold, meticulous, stingy?He refused his wife any luxury.” Paul was lisabeth’s favorite and nurtured his dream of becoming an artist. At age 13 C‚zanne enrolled in Aix’s prestigious College Bourbon where he befriended Zola, who was younger and unpopular. Taking Zola’s side against a group of school bullies, the two boys became inseparable. Zola’s parents moved to Paris in 1858 and the two young men corresponded. In 1861 after strong pleading, Zola convinced C‚zanne to move to Paris defying his father’s wish that he enter the legal profession. C‚zanne first vented his creative urges, ghoulish in nature, through poetry, writing of rape and corpses. He began painting in 1862, supported by an allowance from his father. He practiced drawing at the liberal Atelier Suisse where he developed his first, if not hesitant, associations with other painters in Paris such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro.
With a solitary life, C‚zanne developed slowly. His early paintings reflect sexual obsessions, repressed anger, violence, pain and frustration. His works began to attract the admiration of fellow impressionists, yet C‚zanne spurned the attention, many times with insulting retorts, preferring solitude and persevering with his painting. Upon the death of his father in 1886 C‚zanne received an inheritance which provided him the financial freedom to pursue his art. The Zola-C‚zanne friendship also ended in 1886 upon the publication of Zola’s book “L’Oeuvre” in which the main character of the book is unable to finish his masterpiece and hangs himself. The last known letter between Zola and C‚zanne is a thank-you note acknowledging the painter’s receipt of the book.
C‚zanne developed his impressionistic style over the years. He preferred living on the outskirts of Aix and his best works exemplified nature. His friends were gardeners, farmers and peasants. He gave them money, painted their portraits and preferred being close to their basic tastes and understanding. In spite of himself, C‚zanne had become a living legend by the turn of the century. Van Gogh had the rare good fortune to bump into C‚zanne one day and eagerly solicited C‚zanne’s opinion of his work. After he had inspected them all C‚zanne said, “Truly, you paint like a madman!”
C‚zanne became involved with Hortense Fiquet, a 19-year-old model from the Jura Mountains when he was 30. A son, Paul, was born in 1872. C‚zanne did not marry Hortense until just before his father’s death in 1886. The couple lived more often apart than together as she preferred Paris and C‚zanne preferred Aix.
C‚zanne fell passionately in love with a woman only once, during 1885. The identity of the woman remains mysterious, although one biographer believes she was a servant named Fanny at Jas de Bouffan, the Aix family home. C‚zanne lived at Jas de Bouffan with his sister and ailing mother until her death in 1897.
C‚zanne died on 22 October 1906, Aix-en-Provence, France. After painting outdoors in a fierce thunderstorm he had fallen gravely ill. Hortense and Paul, alerted in advance, did not arrive in time because Mme. C‚zanne refused to reschedule a dressmaker’s appointment. One year later in the Grand Palais the Salon d’Automne honored C‚zanne with two rooms dedicated to his work. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke attended the exhibit. Enraptured with his work, he wrote “this old man?using up his love in anonymous labor, creating such purified works,” probably captured the essence of C‚zanne’s life and work.
Link to Wikipedia biography