Paul Cézanne

The Card Players by Paul Cezanne

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Still Life with Apples By Cezanne

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Turning Road at Montgeroult By Cezanne

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Portrait of Peasant By Cezanne

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Milk Can and Apples By Cezanne

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Canvas prints of paintings from French artist and post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Originating in Provence at the end of the 19th century, Cézanne is one of the artists known for his influence on modern art and for his technical innovations in painting. Many of his works are housed in Paris at the Musée du Louvre.

Canvas Art Factory is a family-owned business selling high-quality reproductions of many of the most famous and sought-after paintings by Paul Cézanne. Many of our products are vintage pieces that have been digitally re-mastered to make them available as canvas art. All paintings are created by professional artists using the finest materials to ensure the highest quality possible.

Early Life

Paul Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, a city located in the south of France. His admiration for landscape came from exploring the nearby countryside in his youth. He enrolled in the free-drawing academy in his home city while he still attended school. In 1858, he graduated from the College Bourbon, where he became close friends with another soon-to-be-prominent artist, the writer Emile Zola. Despite his eagerness to study art, a year later, Cezanne followed his father’s advice and enrolled on a law degree at the University of Aix in 1859. Finally, in 1861, he moved to Paris and fully committed to artmaking. In Paris, Cezanne frequented the Louvre and would later say, “The Louvre is the book from which we learn to read.”

Cezanne and the Impressionists

Paul Cezanne’s contemporaries were the Impressionist artists Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Camille Pissarro, to name a few. While he was associated with the Impressionists, he was nothing like them. His practice differed in that he preferred to paint in a studio while the Impressionists preferred to paint en plein air. His brushstrokes were organised and orderly while the Impressionists favoured a more spontaneous approach. While the Impressionists were all style, Cezanne preferred symbolism and substance. On the subject, Cezanne had said, “I wanted to make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the museums.”

Cezanne would eventually fall out with the Impressionists thanks to his bad bedside manner. In 1874, he participated in the first Impressionists exhibition, then again in 1877. Pissarro had a profound influence on Cezanne, who began to paint with a brighter palette, as seen in The Bathers (1874-75). Before this, Cezanne used dark colours to paint classical themes, as seen in the painting Portrait of a Man with a Blue Cap (1865-66). Pissarro’s influence led Cezanne to experiment with tonal variations to create dimensions in objects.

Why was Paul Cezanne so important for painting?

It’s not surprising to hear that Cezanne’s art was rejected year after year by the Paris Salon, who preferred tradition over experimentation. Every year between 1864 and 1882, Cezanne would submit his work and the Salon would then send these pieces to the Salon des Refuses, which was basically the exhibition of rejects. Cezanne wasn’t the only famous artist who showed his work here. A number of Impressionists exhibited here, along with Gustave Courbet, James Whistler, and Henri Fantin-Latour. The first and only time the Salon graciously accepted a painting by Cezanne was in 1882.

Cezanne’s persistence in artmaking is impressive. For twenty years, Cezanne didn’t exhibit his work. While he got along with the Impressionist artists, Cezanne didn’t quite fit in with their idea of art, which was to paint light and capture sights in the blink of an eye.

Artworks

Over a forty-year career, Paul Cezanne created more than 900 oil paintings and 400 watercolours. Cezanne drew almost every day. He created over 2,000 works on paper, whether they were in sketchbooks or loose paper, in watercolour or pencil.

In 1895, Cezanne had his first one-man show, thanks to the help of Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard. The show helped Cezanne gain favour and interest from the public.

The Card Players (1890)

The Card Players is one painting in a series of five that Cezanne painted. Pictured are peasants from France’s southern region, Provence, playing cards. The Card Players is celebrated for creating a three-dimensional look to the figures. Rather than depicting a scene filled with rowdy, drunken gamblers, Cezanne chose to paint stoic-faced men gathered in a simple setting.

The Bathers (1898-05)

Cezanne worked on The Bathers for seven years. By the time of his death in 1906, the painting stands unfinished. The painting is known for its symmetrical dimensions, where it depicts nudes lounging across the landscape. He created other versions of this painting too. The Large Bathers, for instance, is Cezanne’s largest artwork ever created. While Cezanne was known for painting models in his studio, the nudes in The Large Bathers (1906) was painted from studies he created in his student years and at the Louvre. In the painting, one figure is based after the goddess Diana and another figure on Venus.

Cezanne’s Influence on Modern Art

Cezanne would go on to influence a milieu of twentieth-century artists. To Pablo Picasso, Cezanne was the “father of us all.” Cezanne is the forefather of Fauvism and the precursor to Cubism. In 1957, one of the founders of Cubism, Georges Braque, noted that “The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Paul Cézanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.”