Custom Framed Art for Your Home Decor

Art Prints & Reproductions - Canvas Art
Museum Art - Decorative Art - Photography

FREE Shipping + 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

Paul Cézanne (1839 - 1906)

Paul Cézanne was considered the founder of modern painting. His revelatory use of color, structure, and perspective set him apart from other great artists working at the time and were to pave the way for the Fauves, Cubists, and Abstract Expressionists to come. Henri Matisse called him "the father of us all".

Cézanne was born into a comfortable, middle-class family in Aix-en-Provence, a small town in the south of France where he was to live most of his life. Obeying his father's wishes to study law, he enrolled in classical art studies in the evening. Art was his true vocation and he was soon to abandon law, and would ultimately go against the norms of his classical art training.

He moved to Paris in 1861, attended the liberal Académie Suisse, and studied great artists such as Rubens and Tintoretto at the Louvre. Many of his early works had dark and visionary themes and he was often plagued with artistic self-doubt.

He returned to the south of France where he met and worked with the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro under whose influence he abandoned his dark themes for a lighter color palette. However, unlike the Impressionists, he was not interested in the effects of light. He wanted to capture color in its truest and most intense form. He also began to emphasize the form and structure of objects.

His had an early understanding of color which can be seen in such works as Natura Morta con Tenda. The leaves on the chestnut trees in Approach to Jas de Bouffan, his family's summer house, are painted with perfectly executed quick brushstrokes and daring, confident color.

He had a deeply emotional attitude towards the countryside where he lived and is perhaps best known for the many landscapes he painted of Mont Ste.-Victoire near his home (La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1900).

Cézanne often painted traditional subjects such as still-lifes and landscapes, but he broke through with a new conceptual vision and paved the way for other avant-garde painters such as Picasso, Derain and the Cubists.

See our complete collection of Paul Cézanne art