Paul Cézanne Art Prints

His father co-founded a bank in Aix and wanted Paul to inherit it, so he first studied law, reluctantly. At school his close friend was Émile Zola, who urged him to follow him to Paris, where the École des Beaux-Arts turned him down. At the free Académie Suisse he met Pissarro and Achille Emperaire, a fellow painter from Aix. The Salon rejected him every year from 1864 to 1869, and critics mocked his work at the Impressionist shows. The family bank, at least, gave him a security most of his fellow painters never had.

Camille Pissarro changed him. Painting beside him at Pontoise in the 1870s, Cézanne dropped his early dark palette for brighter colour and loose strokes laid side by side. Long afterwards he still called himself Pissarro's pupil.

Back in Provence he returned to the same subjects again and again. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire in about eighty paintings and watercolours, after first praising it as a “beau motif” seen from a train. In Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue, look near the centre-right for the bridge that carried that railway across the Arc valley. The Card Players used farmhands from around the family estate, the Jas de Bouffan, as models, and leaves out the drink, money and drama that older card-game pictures relied on. In his still lifes he arranged the fruit in the studio and would enlarge a single pear if the composition needed the weight. Once money allowed, he hired a professional model, a young Italian named Michelangelo di Rosa, for The Boy in the Red Vest.

Wider notice came late, with Ambroise Vollard's show of his work in 1895. He kept working outdoors to the end: caught in a storm while painting in October 1906, he collapsed, and died of pneumonia a week later.