Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a banker whose success gave him a financial security most of his contemporaries lacked. He studied drawing in Aix under Joseph Gibert, abandoned law and followed his school friend Émile Zola to Paris in 1861. Turned down by the École des Beaux-Arts, he drew at the Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro, who became his mentor and, painting beside him at Pontoise, persuaded him to give up dark colours. He showed with the Impressionists at their first exhibition in 1874, then developed a pictorial language of his own, building forms from planes of colour and small, repeated brushstrokes that stress the underlying structure of things. His work met with incomprehension and ridicule until Ambroise Vollard gave him his first solo exhibition in 1895. He spent his later years mainly in Aix, returning again and again to Mont Sainte-Victoire, and died there in 1906. His work forms the bridge between Impressionism and Cubism. Here: The Card Players, one of five versions he painted between 1890 and 1895, using farm labourers from around the Jas de Bouffan as models.