Paul Cezanne
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49 free Paul Cezanne trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Paul Cézanne was rejected by the Salon every year for decades, called a mason with a trowel by Manet, and was chased out of his hometown's good graces by newspaper clippings on his doormat. By the time he died after collapsing in a storm, Matisse and Picasso were calling him the father of them all. These 49 questions cover the life and the work: the banker father and the law degree he did not want, the schoolboy friendship with Zola and the novel that ended it, Pissarro as 'God the Father', the hidden family in L'Estaque, and Vollard's 1895 show that turned a hundredfold price rise. You will get Mont Sainte-Victoire and its railway bridge, the five Card Players and the Qatar record, the Philadelphia Bathers and the gap in the studio wall, the palette-knife couillardes, the Four Seasons signed 'Ingres', and the Salon trick that got him hung once. Easy questions cover Aix, Post-Impressionism and cylinders; the hard tier asks about Chocquet's letter, Henri Rochefort, uncle Dominique and the Cincinnati X-ray. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01With which fruit did Cézanne say he wanted to astonish Paris?
An apple
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.
Q 02Cézanne showed with the Impressionists, but which movement is he usually filed under?
Post-Impressionism
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.
Q 03Which mountain near Aix did Cézanne paint dozens of times?
Mont Sainte-Victoire
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.
Q 04Which famous novelist was Cézanne's schoolfriend in Aix?
Émile Zola
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.
Q 05Which painter called Cézanne 'my one and only master' and 'the father of us all'?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 06Which three solids did Cézanne say nature should be treated in terms of?
Cylinder, sphere and cone
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.
Q 07What was Cézanne's father's profession?
Banker
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.
Q 08What was the name of the family estate outside Aix that Cézanne painted for decades?
Jas de Bouffan
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.
Q 09Which establishment painter's name did Cézanne sign as a joke on his 1860 Four Seasons murals?
Ingres
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.
Q 10What did Cézanne study at university in Aix at his father's insistence?
Law
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.
Q 11At which informal Paris studio did Cézanne draw from the model after arriving from Aix in 1861?
Académie Suisse
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.
Q 12Which older painter did Cézanne call 'something like the good Lord' and name as his teacher?
Camille Pissarro
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.
Q 13Whom did Cézanne paint more often than any other model, in nearly thirty portraits?
Q 21Which 1886 novel put a failed painter modelled partly on Cézanne at its centre?
L'Œuvre
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.
Q 22Cézanne married Hortense in 1886, long after the romance had cooled, chiefly to do what?
To legitimise their son Paul
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.
Q 23Which dealer gave Cézanne his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1895?
Ambroise Vollard
His wife Hortense
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'.
Q 14In which fishing village near Marseille did Cézanne sit out the Franco-Prussian War?
L'Estaque
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.
Q 15Which doctor, later Van Gogh's physician, befriended Cézanne at Auvers-sur-Oise in the 1870s?
Paul Gachet
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.
Q 16Which painter mocked Cézanne as a 'bricklayer who paints with a trowel' and skipped the 1874 Impressionist show?
Édouard Manet
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.
Q 17Which scandalous 1863 nude did Cézanne rework for the first Impressionist show, adding a male onlooker?
Olympia
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.
Q 18Which Cézanne canvas did the collector Count Doria buy at the first Impressionist show in 1874?
The Hanged Man's House
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.
Q 19Which customs inspector became Cézanne's most loyal collector from 1875?
Victor Chocquet
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.
Q 20How did Cézanne's father learn in 1878 that the painter had a secret partner and child?
He opened his son's mail
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.
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.
Q 24Which Impressionist told his friend Clemenceau that Cézanne was 'the greatest of us all'?
Claude Monet
Claude Monet. He backed the words with his wallet, buying Cézanne's canvases to hang on his own walls at Giverny.
Q 25Which painter did Cézanne accuse of stealing his 'little sensation'?
Paul Gauguin
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.
Q 26Who posed for Cézanne's Card Players?
Farmhands
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.
Q 27Who bought a version of The Card Players in 2011 for an estimated $250 million?
Qatar's royal family
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.
Q 28Which London gallery owns a two-player Card Players and its companion study Man with a Pipe?
Courtauld
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.
Q 29Which city's museum owns the largest of Cézanne's Bathers?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 30Why did Cézanne paint his late Bathers without live nude models?
He was too shy to ask
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.