Paul Cézanne

His father, Louis Auguste Cézanne (1798–1886), a native of Saint-Zacharie (Var), was the co-founder of a banking firm (Banque Cézanne et Cabassol) 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.

His teacher was the academic painter Joseph Gibert (1806–1884).

His mother, Anne Elisabeth Honorine Aubert (1814–1897), was "vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offence".

It was from her that Cézanne got his conception and vision of life.

He also had two younger sisters, Marie and Rose, with whom he went to a primary school every day.

At the age of ten Cézanne entered the Saint Joseph school in Aix.

Paul Cézanne (, , , ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century.

Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence.

On 22 February, he was baptized in the Église de la Madeleine, with his grandmother and uncle Louis as godparents, and became a devout Catholic later in life.

His parents only married after the birth of Paul and his sister Marie (born 1841) on 29 January 1844.

In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix (now Collège Mignet), where he became friends with Émile Zola, who was in a less advanced class, as well as Baptistin Baille—three friends who came to be known as "Les Trois Inséparables" (The Three Inseparables).

It was probably the most carefree time of his life as the friends swam and fished on the banks of the Arc.

They debated art, read Homer and Virgil and practiced writing their own poems.

Cézanne often wrote his verses in Latin.

Zola urged him to take poetry more seriously, but Cézanne saw it as just a pastime.

He stayed there for six years, though in the last two years he was a day scholar.

His youngest sister Rose was born in June 1854.

The Cézannes came from the commune of Saint-Sauveur (Hautes-Alpes, Occitania).

In 1857, he began attending the Free Municipal School of Drawing in Aix, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk.

At the request of his authoritarian father, who traditionally saw in his son the heir to his bank Cézanne & Cabassol, Paul Cézanne enrolled in the law faculty of the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1859 and attended lectures for the study of jurisprudence.

He spent two years with his unloved studies, but increasingly neglected them and preferred to devote himself to drawing exercises and writing poems.

From 1859, Cézanne took evening courses at the École de dessin d'Aix-en-Provence, which was housed in the art museum of Aix, the Musée Granet.

In August 1859 he won second prize in the figure studies course there.

His father bought the Jas de Bouffan (House of the Wind) estate that same year.

This partly derelict baroque residence of the former provincial governor later became the painter's home and workplace for a long time.

The building and the old trees in the park of the property were among the artist's favorite subjects.

In 1860, Cézanne obtained permission to paint the walls of the drawing room, and created the large-format murals of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter (today in the Petit Palais in Paris), which Cézanne ironically signed as Ingres, whose works he did not appreciate.

Until the late 1890s it was mainly fellow artists such as Camille Pissarro and the art dealer and gallery owner Ambroise Vollard who discovered Cézanne's work and were among the first to buy his paintings.

In 1895, Vollard opened the first solo exhibition in his Paris gallery, which led to a broader examination of the artist's work.

Paul Cézanne was born the son of the milliner and later banker Louis-Auguste Cézanne and Anne-Elisabeth-Honorine Aubert at 28 rue de l'Opera in Aix-en-Provence.

Classmates were the later sculptor Philippe Solari and Henri Gasquet, father of the writer Joachim Gasquet, who was to publish his book Cézanne in 1921, a testament to the life of the artist.

Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th century Cubism.

While his early works are still influenced by Romanticism – such as the murals in the Jas de Bouffan country house – and Realism, Cézanne arrived at a new pictorial language through intensive examination of Impressionist forms of expression.

He altered conventional approaches to perspective and broke established rules of academic art by emphasizing the underlying structure of objects in a composition and the formal qualities of art.

Cézanne strived for a renewal of traditional design methods on the basis of the impressionistic colour space and colour modulation principles.

Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable.

He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields.

The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects.

Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne "is the father of us all".

His painting provoked incomprehension and ridicule in contemporary art criticism.