Cezanne's best friend wrote a novel about him in which he fails at everything and hangs himself. The friend was Emile Zola. They had met as boys at the College Bourbon in Aix-en-Provence: Cezanne big, quick-tempered, and wealthy; Zola frail, bookish, and bullied. Cezanne became his protector. They called themselves the inseparables. In 1886, Zola published L'Oeuvre, in which the fictional painter Claude Lantier, clearly modelled on Cezanne, struggles, fails, and commits suicide in front of his final canvas. Cezanne sent a brief note of thanks for the copy. They never spoke again.
Timeline
1839
Born on 19 January in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a hat maker who later became a prosperous banker.
1852
At 13, befriended the future novelist Emile Zola at school in Aix-en-Provence.
1872
At 33, worked alongside Pissarro at Pontoise, a collaboration that transformed his palette and technique.
1895
At 56, received his first major solo exhibition at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in Paris.
1906
Died on 22 October aged 67 in Aix-en-Provence after collapsing in a rainstorm while painting outdoors.
Biography
His father was a banker in Aix who disapproved of art as a career. Cezanne was financially dependent on him until the inheritance came through, at which point he was free to paint with what his biographers describe as extraordinary patience. He needed it. His work was rejected and ridiculed for decades. He became so reclusive that parts of the Paris art world believed he had died.
He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire approximately eighty times, from different angles, in different light, across different seasons. The mountain near Aix became his most sustained subject, a single form explored until it yielded everything he wanted to understand about colour, structure, and the way objects sit in space.
The still lifes are equally obsessive. He declared that with an apple he wanted to astonish Paris. He chose still life, the genre most dismissed by the academy, and used it to dismantle single-point perspective. His apples sit on tables seen from multiple viewpoints at once. The tablecloth folds in ways that contradict the angle of the fruit. Nothing quite lines up. Picasso and Braque would later build Cubism on exactly this principle.
He was difficult. He destroyed paintings he disliked. He reportedly made one sitter pose for three months, then slashed the canvas. He could be charming and then cruel in the same conversation. His first solo exhibition, arranged by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, did not happen until he was fifty-six. Recognition came in the final decade of his life, largely from younger painters who understood what he had been doing all along.
