49 Fun Facts About Paul Cezanne

With which fruit did Cézanne say he wanted to astonish Paris?

An apple. 'With an apple I will astonish Paris,' he declared, staking his name on still life, the genre the French Academy ranked at the very bottom.

Cézanne showed with the Impressionists, but which movement is he usually filed under?

Post-Impressionism. The label is English, not French: the critic Roger Fry popularised it with his 1910 London show 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists', four years after Cézanne died.

Which mountain near Aix did Cézanne paint dozens of times?

Mont Sainte-Victoire. One view met only incomprehension when he showed it in Aix in 1895, and he ended up giving the canvas to a young poet who sincerely admired it.

Which famous novelist was Cézanne's schoolfriend in Aix?

Émile Zola. With Baptistin Baille they were 'the three inseparables' at school, and it was Zola, by then in Paris, who chided the wavering Cézanne into following him there to paint.

Which painter called Cézanne 'my one and only master' and 'the father of us all'?

Pablo Picasso. Paris honoured Cézanne with two memorial shows in 1907, the year after he died, and Picasso and Braque came away with the ideas they soon turned into Cubism.

Which three solids did Cézanne say nature should be treated in terms of?

Cylinder, sphere and cone. His 1904 advice never mentions a cube, yet the Cubists who came after him took the line as a founding text.

What was Cézanne's father's profession?

Banker. A hatter by trade, Louis-Auguste co-founded the Cézanne and Cabassol bank in 1848, and its profits paid his son an allowance through the decades when his canvases found almost no buyers.

What was the name of the family estate outside Aix that Cézanne painted for decades?

Jas de Bouffan. His father bought the estate in 1859 and later built him a studio under its roof; when the family sold up in 1899, Cézanne lost the place he had painted for forty years.

Which establishment painter's name did Cézanne sign as a joke on his 1860 Four Seasons murals?

Ingres. As a joke the young Cézanne signed his parents' salon murals with the academic master's name and dated one panel 1811, almost three decades before he himself was born.

What did Cézanne study at university in Aix at his father's insistence?

Law. He enrolled to please his father but kept slipping off to drawing classes, and after two years he won permission to leave for Paris and paint.

At which informal Paris studio did Cézanne draw from the model after arriving from Aix in 1861?

Académie Suisse. Founded by a former artists' model, it offered live models but no teaching, and Cézanne, dismayed at how well the others drew, was back in Aix within months.

Which older painter did Cézanne call 'something like the good Lord' and name as his teacher?

Camille Pissarro. Painting beside him at Pontoise, Pissarro coaxed Cézanne out of his dark palette, and thirty years on Cézanne still listed himself in exhibition catalogues as a student of Pissarro.

Whom did Cézanne paint more often than any other model, in nearly thirty portraits?

His wife Hortense. She sat motionless through sitting after sitting, yet the marriage was so cool that he was reported to say she cared for nothing but 'Switzerland and lemonade'.

In which fishing village near Marseille did Cézanne sit out the Franco-Prussian War?

L'Estaque. Declared a draft dodger in January 1871, he lay low there with his companion and went on painting, and he kept coming back to paint its bay well into the 1880s.

Which doctor, later Van Gogh's physician, befriended Cézanne at Auvers-sur-Oise in the 1870s?

Paul Gachet. An amateur artist himself, he bought one of Cézanne's canvases and lent it back for the 1874 Impressionist show, sixteen years before Van Gogh became his patient.

Which painter mocked Cézanne as a 'bricklayer who paints with a trowel' and skipped the 1874 Impressionist show?

Édouard Manet. The young Impressionists had rallied to him, yet he stayed out of their exhibitions and kept sending his pictures to the official Salon instead.

Which scandalous 1863 nude did Cézanne rework for the first Impressionist show, adding a male onlooker?

Olympia. Cézanne's A Modern Olympia brings in the client the original leaves outside the frame, a bald, bearded figure usually read as the painter himself.

Which Cézanne canvas did the collector Count Doria buy at the first Impressionist show in 1874?

The Hanged Man's House. The view of a lane in Auvers found a buyer at a show where his entries drew the harshest abuse of all, and it became the best-known picture of his Impressionist years.

Which customs inspector became Cézanne's most loyal collector from 1875?

Victor Chocquet. He came across Cézanne's canvases in a paint dealer's shop, bought three at once and went on buying until he owned more than thirty of them.

How did Cézanne's father learn in 1878 that the painter had a secret partner and child?

He opened his son's mail. A collector's letter gave away the family Cézanne had hidden for six years; his father threatened to cut off the allowance but in the end kept paying it.

Which 1886 novel put a failed painter modelled partly on Cézanne at its centre?

L'Œuvre. Its hero Claude Lantier ends by hanging himself from his studio scaffolding; Cézanne acknowledged his copy with a short, formal note of thanks.

Cézanne married Hortense in 1886, long after the romance had cooled, chiefly to do what?

To legitimise their son Paul. The boy was already fourteen when his parents finally wed in Aix, and before the year was out the couple were living apart again.

Which dealer gave Cézanne his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1895?

Ambroise Vollard. A newcomer to the trade, he got hold of some 150 canvases, and the show made the painter's name among younger artists and paid for the dealer's move to a bigger gallery.

Which Impressionist told his friend Clemenceau that Cézanne was 'the greatest of us all'?

Claude Monet. He backed the words with his wallet, buying Cézanne's canvases to hang on his own walls at Giverny.

Which painter did Cézanne accuse of stealing his 'little sensation'?

Paul Gauguin. The two painted side by side at Pontoise in 1881, and Cézanne came to fear the younger man had carried off his method; he later dismissed Gauguin's own pictures as mere chinoiseries.

Who posed for Cézanne's Card Players?

Farmhands. Men from his family's estate seem to have posed for him one at a time, and he built the card games himself from those studies, painting the subject five times in the 1890s.

Who bought a version of The Card Players in 2011 for an estimated $250 million?

Qatar's royal family. The private deal more than doubled the auction record of the day, and it only came to light when Vanity Fair reported it in February 2012.

Which London gallery owns a two-player Card Players and its companion study Man with a Pipe?

Courtauld. The textile magnate Samuel Courtauld said he felt 'the magic' on first seeing a Cézanne in 1922, bought the painter's work in depth and left it to the institute he founded.

Which city's museum owns the largest of Cézanne's Bathers?

Philadelphia. The last of his three giant Bathers was still unfinished when he died, bare canvas showing through, yet the trio went on to leave a lasting mark on Cubism.

Why did Cézanne paint his late Bathers without live nude models?

He was too shy to ask. So, by his own admission, the great nudes of his last years were built from memories of museum pictures and the life drawings of his student days.

What did Cézanne have built into the wall of his last studio for the big Bathers canvases?

A long narrow gap. The slit, about three metres tall, was cut in the studio wall so that his largest canvases could be passed in and out.

Which modern intrusion did Cézanne include in several 1880s views of his favourite mountain?

A railway bridge. The arched viaduct carried the Aix–Marseille line across the Arc valley, and in one view he even added the trail of steam left by a passing train.

Which Cézanne portrait of an Italian model was stolen from a Zurich museum in 2008?

The Boy in the Red Vest. Thieves took it along with three other masterpieces in 2008, and police recovered it in Serbia four years later.

Which American novelist wrote that he was 'learning something from the painting of Cézanne' as a young writer in Paris?

Ernest Hemingway. In A Moveable Feast he recalls studying the Cézannes on an empty stomach, and deciding that the painter 'was probably hungry in a different way'.

How did Cézanne get his one and only Salon acceptance, in 1882?

A juror passed him off as a pupil. His friend Antoine Guillemet used a jury member's right to hang one student's picture unjudged, nearly two decades after the Salon first turned Cézanne away.

What illness did Cézanne develop in 1890?

Diabetes. It left him irritable and ever more withdrawn through his last sixteen years, and he was still enduring a harsh course of treatment in the summer before he died.

Which Belgian avant-garde group invited Cézanne to exhibit in Brussels in 1890?

Les XX. 'The Twenty' invited outside artists to Brussels each year, and at the 1890 show where Cézanne hung, Van Gogh sold The Red Vineyard to the painter Anna Boch, herself one of the Twenty.

Which Nabi painter's Homage to Cézanne shows his friends gathered round one of Cézanne's still lifes?

Maurice Denis. His big canvas of 1900 gathers the Nabi painters around a Cézanne still life in a Paris dealer's shop; the novelist André Gide bought it and later gave it to the nation.

Which poet kept returning to the 1907 Cézanne memorial show in Paris and described it in letters to his wife?

Rainer Maria Rilke. He wrote to his wife Clara about the paintings day after day that October, and the letters were later published as a book, Letters on Cézanne.

Which young painter-theorist visited Aix in 1904, drew out Cézanne's most quoted letters and published memoirs of him?

Émile Bernard. He stayed a month, painting in a room beneath the studio, kept the old man writing to him until the end, and brought out his recollections the year after Cézanne died.

What was Cézanne's last painting, worked on the day he took to his deathbed?

Portrait of the Gardener Vallier. Already gravely ill, he dragged himself back to the easel for one more session with his old gardener, then took to the bed he never left.

How was Cézanne brought home after collapsing in a rainstorm while painting in October 1906?

On a laundry cart. He had lain out in the rain for hours before its driver found him; he tried to paint again the next day, but pneumonia set in and he died within days.

At which 1863 Paris exhibition, set up on Napoleon III's orders, did the young Cézanne show his work?

Salon des Refusés. The emperor ordered it after artists protested at the official jury's rejections, and critics savaged the show; the Salon itself went on refusing Cézanne for most of the next twenty years.

Whom did Cézanne name sole heir in his 1902 will, excluding his wife?

His son Paul. The will says in so many words that his wife would have 'no legal claim' on the estate; Paul, who already handled his father's dealings with buyers, inherited everything.

Which 17th-century French master did Cézanne say he wanted to 'do over again from nature'?

Nicolas Poussin. Cézanne wanted the calm, built-up order of Poussin's classical landscapes, but found out of doors in front of the motif instead of composed in the studio.

Which Paris paint merchant, painted three times by Van Gogh, took Cézanne's canvases in exchange for supplies?

Père Tanguy. For years his little shop was Cézanne's only foothold in Paris, the one place where younger painters and the first curious buyers could see his pictures.

Which hilltop town near Aix did Cézanne paint in 1885–86 in almost Cubist facets?

Gardanne. He settled his family there for a year, sending his son to the village school, while he painted its houses stacked up the hill like building blocks.

Which critic coined 'Impressionists' in a mocking review of the 1874 show where Cézanne exhibited?

Louis Leroy. He meant it as a sneer, writing his review as a comic dialogue between two baffled visitors, but the painters soon took the label for their own.

What did an X-ray reveal beneath Cézanne's 1865 Still Life with Bread and Eggs in 2022?

A portrait of a man. A conservator in Cincinnati noticed odd cracks, X-rayed the canvas on a hunch and found the figure lying sideways under the bread; it may be Cézanne himself in his twenties.