Paul Cézanne was born into a bourgeois family in 1939 in Aix-en-Provence, Southern France.  It was a large aristocratic town and in the mid 1800’s it went into decline gradually wiping out the aristocrats.  The bourgeoisie took over in terms of power and Cézanne’s family became increasingly wealthy.  They eventually owned the large estate of Jas de Bouffon.  Cézanne’s closest friend was Zola.  He encouraged him from the age of fifteen to paint and draw.  From the age of eighteen Cézanne struggled with his need to paint and his father’s wishes for him to study Law.  He would spend the rest of his life moving between Paris and Provence and trying to please both himself and his father.  Up until his fathers death in 1886 he was completely financially dependant on him.  It was due to this that he resented his father.  He struggled between pleasing and resisted him throughout his life.  For many years he lived a secret life with his love interest, Hortense, and later their son, Paul.  It was not until long after their marriage that he revealed the truth to his family.  He is said to have written to Zola with tales of fanaticising about killing his family but they were convenient sitters for his paintings.  He was a mysterious and misunderstood artist.  He was in constant mental and emotional turmoil.

Cézanne’s work can be divided up into different periods spanning his complex painting career.  While he was always interested in the same outcome, his work changed dramatically as he explored it.  He saw himself as dealing with the art elements, form and structure, and the mechanics of painting rather than trying to portray a scene or object.  It didn’t matter what he was painting, just how.  “He dedicated his whole life to the artistic problems he set himself” (Gombrich, 2000, P. 538).  While his style maintains similar characteristics throughout his whole career, distinct elements can be seen in each period.  Right through we see the use of a palette knife as his primary tool.  He always maintains a restricted palette although this changes quite obviously as his work develops.  He continuously seeks to live up to or be better than the artists in the Louvre, whom he greatly admired.  And finally he is foremost concerned with the underlying structure of the objects or scene he is painting.  He has a passionate use of colour from the pink of his early nudes to the green of his late landscapes.  If we hung all his paintings side by side in chronological order we could clearly identify the development of his work due to his many influences.  Pissarro in particular greatly influenced him, as did the city of Paris.  Paris made him as a painter.  Finally the social events of the time had an impact on his works.  While he did not literally paint the social changes around him they affected his choice of subject matter.  He disapproved of the developments and chose not to acknowledge them in his life and works.

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In his early works Cézanne stated, “my pictures reveal a Baroque temperament and a heightened sensuality” (BBC, 1995).  This comes across due to his use of contrasting colours that are bold and daring.  The works are characterised by both a dark, heavy use of colour and paint.  This achieves a romantic feel seen evidently in his Self-Portrait of 1861/2 with its strong colours and high intensity.  His works are “passionate, violent, and expressionistic” (Eisenman, 1994, p. 391).

From 1862 onwards his work took on a raw ...

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