Grand Palais

Paul Cézanne

Artist

b. 1839

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French painter whose work forms a bridge between Impressionism and the art of the twentieth century. Born in Aix-en-Provence, he moved to Paris in the early 1860s, where he befriended Camille Pissarro and took part in the first and third Impressionist exhibitions in 1874 and 1877. Working largely in isolation in Provence in later life, he developed a method of constructing form through planes and patches of colour, applied above all to still lifes, portraits, bathers and repeated views of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. His first solo exhibition, organised by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1895, and the retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907, the year after his death, made him a decisive reference for artists from Matisse and Picasso to the Cubists and beyond.