All oil paintings of Paul Cézanne (19 Century, French,
Post-Impressionism) will be hand painted by our professional artists. Let HandmadePiece help you bring better museum quality art reproductions of Paul Cézanne to home. Photo preview of the finished art will be offered before delivery, global free shipping. View high-resolution
Paul Cézanne reproduction samples to check the replica quality HandmadePiece is able to provide.
1839-1906 • French • Painter • Post-Impressionist
"But I always come back to this: the painter should devote himself entirely to the study of nature and endeavor to produce pictures that are an education. Chatter about art is almost useless." - Cezanne
Throughout his lifetime, even while he was rejected by the press and public, other artists collected Cezanne's paintings: PISSARRO owned fourteen, DEGAS seven, RENOIR three, GAUGUIN five, and in 1899 MATISSE bought Cezanne's Three Women Bathers(1879-82) even though he, Matisse, was near financial ruin. Cezanne's first one-man exhibition was held by VOLLARD in 1895. FAUVE, CUBIST, German EXPRESSIONIST, Russian SUPREMATIST, and CONSTRUCTIVIST movements were all directly indebted to him. The vision his work inspired was powerful enough to penetrate four centuries of obscurity and revive the reputation of PIERO della Francesca: Both he and Cezanne represented figures and objects as geometric, volumetric forms. Cezanne's range was grand and diverse-portraits, FIGURES (notably bathers), landscapes (especially Mont-Sainte-Victoire in Provence), and STILL LIFEs. In the latter category he is famous for his signature apples on a tipped surface, or plane. Using psychoanalytic theory, Meyer SCHAPIRo's influential 1968 essay considers that Cezanne's apples carry "a latent erotic sense" and show "an unconscious symbolizing of a repressed desire." Cezanne's often quoted intent may have been, as he told BERNARD, to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone," although its relevance to his own work is dubious, and it is suggested he may have been speaking primarily as a "teacher." Perhaps more important was his comment to the effect that he wanted to make something solid and durable of IMPRESSIONISM, for Cezanne was concerned with solidity, volume, and form. His devotion to solid form was equaled by his commitment to color, which he used for MODELING, rather than using the age-old technique of shading, or tonal modeling with black and white. Of himself, and of his great series of male and female bathers, Cezanne wrote that he wished to do "Poussin over entirely from nature." Respectful of that great 17th century French painter, Cezanne's comment is ambiguous but understandable. Like POUSSIN, Cezanne was interested in CLASSICAL authors, but unlike Poussin, whose scenes were idealized, Cezanne painted as, if not exactly what, he saw. Regarding the bathers, whom he painted in landscape settings, among the obvious problems he cited was "to gather together the necessary number of people . . . willing to undress and remain motionless in the poses I had determined." (He once shouted at a restless model, "Be an apple!") Of his contemporaries, he most admired "the humble and colossal Pissarro," nine years his senior, who became his painting companion. Cezanne was born in Aix-en -Provence. His father, a tyrant whom he feared, made hats-and enough money to buy the local bank. At the College Bourbon, Cezanne developed his love of classical literature-he held Virgil and Plato above all-and a friendship with Emile Zola. In many ways this friendship was the emotional center of Cezanne's life, and it became exceedingly painful. It ended when Zola published L'Oeuure in 1886, and Cezanne saw a character in the novel as unkindly representing himself. A shy man, given to out bursts of rage, Cezanne was both insecure and over confident about his own art. Despite the esteem his work enjoyed, Cezanne was never quite satisfied with it, and the very year of his death he wrote, "Shall I ever reach the goal so eagerly sought and so long pursued? I hope so, but as long as it has not been attained a vague feeling of discomfort persists which will not disappear until I shall have gained the harbor."