to study and work, but because he lived in fear of his domineering
father, he spent a year as a law student before confessing to his family
that he really wanted to become an artist. Eventually, he was allowed a
small allowance and permitted to go to Paris.
Six months later he returned home because of fits of depression in which
he ripped up his canvasses. But after a year of tedious work spent in
his father's bank, he decided to return again to Paris. Unfortunately,
he failed to pass the entrance examination to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
the official painting school. He never tried again but was much more
persistent in submitting paintings to the Salon, the annual exhibition
for artists to become known to the general public.
Althogh year after year they refused to show Cezanne's paintings.
It was typical of his character to proclaim the stupidity of the
official system and he wrote rude letters to the superintendent of fine
Arts.
He was a difficult and timid person, who hated interference and had a
pathological loathing of being touched. When his friend Bernard tried
to help him to his feet when he tripped,
he flew into a rage, swore and ran off, looking back as if he had tried
to kill him.
His paintings in the 1860's mirror his inner turmoil: corpses, murders
and orgies dominated his easle.
Then, at the age of 30, he radically changed both his habits and his
painting style. In 1869 he met a young model called Hortense Fiquet,
who became his mistress.
He turned increasingly to landscape subjects and started painting in the
open air like the Impressionists. They were a group of French artists
who revolutionised painting by their new ideas on the use of bold
colour, expressive brushwork and working directly from nature in the
open air.
In 1872 Cezanne had a son but he remained so terrified of his own father
that he did not dare tell the him he had a family. He therefore had to
support Hortense and his son from his small allowance and this situation
amazingly remained unchanged for years.
When Cezanne was in Aix, he would lodge Hortense elsewhere. He kept his
secret for 17 years but eventually married in 1886 when his father died
leaving him a comfortable fortune.
Cezanne met Pissarro, another Impressionist, who was nine year's older
and became a benevolent father figure to him. He taught him a lot of
painting techniques and after this, Cezanne began to develop his own
style.
In the last 20 years of his life he rarely left his home in Provence.
He became more and more touchy and suspicious, almost a recluse, even
though his paintings began to sell well. He died in 1906 after catching
pneumonia while painting outdoors and being caught in a storm.
He painted many still lifes and hundreds of works of Mont Ste-victoire.
His whole life with art was a constant struggle to perfect his
paintings. His famous saying "Treat nature by the cylinder, sphere and
cone" is practised by all student artists today. He is
known as the father of modern art because of his revolutionary ways of
painting, distorting images by depicting objects from several angles at
once, and exploiting the visual phenomenon whereby warm colours (red and
yellow) appear to come towards us,
while cold colours (blues and greens) seem to recede.
He moulded form by colour and in blocky dash-like strokes.
He didn't want to imitate the real world and called his paintings
'constructions after nature'. He would sometimes work on paintings
for years, painstakingly dabbing on patches of colour until he was
satisfied with the results.
During the final 10 years of his life, Cezanne worked, among other
things, on 3 major paintings of women bathers set in landscapes, and
they were worked over for many years.
The theme of nudes in the landscape has a long history and many artists
also did this.
Cezanne was exceptionally reticent with the idea of using live models.
In fact, he is only known to have worked directly from a model once
during the time of these bathing paintings. His sources for his figures
tended to be from past art. Either from his own student studies, or from
Old Masters.
Surprisingly, even these images were either copied from other artists or
from sculptures.
As he found it almost impossible to draw a live model, this reserve
shows in his pictures of the bathers, particularly. Many of the figures
are separated by contour lines and not one of them has a mouth. Even
their eyes are obscure.
lacks detail
vibrant colours that I prefere
there is no atmosphere to the piece
one of many
There are two 'Large Bathers' pictures. The largest, 7'x8' (208 x
250cms) is in
Philadephia and the other 127 x 195cms is in the National Gallery,
London.