Paul Cézanne
French painter (1839–1906) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Cézanne (19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French painter. He was born in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France, and died of pneumonia there.
The artistic career of Paul Cézanne lasted more than forty years, from roughly 1860 to 1906. A busy artist, he produced more than 900 oil paintings and 400 watercolours, including many incomplete works.
Cézanne's work is broadly post-impressionist. His work helped change the 19th-century idea of art to the very different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne's work is the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th-century Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that "Cézanne is the father of us all" is significant.
Cézanne's work shows a mastery of design, colour and composition. His brushstrokes are clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings reveal Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze, and a struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.
Cézanne's The Card Players (1882) is at present the world's most expensive painting. It was sold for more than $250 million in 2011 to the royal family of Qatar.[2][3] What makes this all the more remarkable is that there are four other Cézanne 'Card Players'. They are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, the Courtauld, and the Barnes Foundation.[3] His best friend was Emile Zola.