Paul Cizanne

The work of Paul Cizanne demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognisable.

He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature.

The paintings convey Cizanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

In Paris, Cizanne met the Impressionists including Camille Pissarro.
Initially the friendship formed in the mid-1860s between Pissarro and Cizanne was that of master and mentoree, with Pissarro exerting a formative influence on the younger artist.

Over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.

Cizanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted.

Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style that was to influence the Impressionists enormously.

Nonetheless, in Cizanne's mature work we see the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting.
Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes.

His statement "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums", and his contention that he was recreating Poussin "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.

Cizanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refuses in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon.

The Salon rejected Cizanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869. Cizanne continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882.

Through the intervention of fellow artist Antoine Guillemet, Cizanne exhibitedThe Portrait of the Artist's Father, 1866 (National Gallery, Washington), his first and last successful submission to the Salon.

Before 1895 Cizanne exhibited twice with the Impressionists (at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877). In later years a few individual paintings were shown at various venues, until 1895, when the Parisian dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave the artist his first solo exhibition.

Despite the increasing public recognition and financial success, Cizanne chose to work in increasing artistic isolation, usually painting in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris.

He concentrated on a few subjects and was highly unusual for 19th-century painters in that he was equally proficient in each of these genres: still life, portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers. For the last, Cizanne was compelled to design from his imagination, due to a lack of available nude models.

Like the landscapes, his portraits were drawn from that which was familiar, so that not only his wife and son but local peasants, children and his art dealer served as subjects.

His still lifes are at once decorative in design, painted with thick, flat surfaces, yet with a weight reminiscent of Courbet. The "props" for his works are still to be found, as he left them, in his studio (atelier), in the suburbs of modern Aix.

Although religious images appeared less frequently in Cizanne's later work, he remained a devout Roman Catholic and said, "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."

One day, he was caught in a storm while working in the field. Only after working for two hours under a downpour did he decide to go home; but on the way he collapsed. He was taken home by a passing driver.

His old housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore the circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness. On the following day, he intended to continue working, but later on he fainted; the model he was working with called for help; he was put to bed, and he never left it again.  He died a few days later, on October 22,1906 . He died of pneumonia and was buried at the old cemetery in his beloved hometown of Aix-en-Provence.