Large Painting in Style of Paul Cézanne, Oil on Board. Signed indistinctly and dated '68 bottom left. Depicts colorful homes, trees, shrubs and landscape. 

Overall: 37 X 49 1/2 in. 

Sight: 35 1/2 X 47 1/2 in. 

#2720 . 

Paul Cézanne was born in January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, whose successful bank business afforded him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries artists throughout his life. In 1852 he entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix, where he made friends with the writer Émile Zola as well as Baptistin Baille, together known as “Les Trois Inséparables” (The Three Inseparables). Cézanne often wrote verses in Latin, and Zola urged him to take poetry more seriously, but Cézanne saw it as just a pastime. In 1857 he began attending the Free Municipal School of Drawing, where he studied under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk. At the request of his authoritarian father, who expected his son to be the heir to his business, Cézanne enrolled in the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1859 to pursue a degree in jurisprudence. Over the next two years he increasingly neglected his studies and preferred to devote himself to drawing exercises and writing poems. In 1860 his father bought the Jas de Bouffan (House of the Wind) estate, a derelict baroque residence of the former provincial governor that later became the painter’s base of operations and workplace. The building and the old trees in the park of the property were among the artist’s favorite subjects. Going against the objections of his father, he committed himself fully to art and left for Paris in 1861. He applied to the École des Beaux-Arts but was turned down, instead attending the free Académie Suisse. There he met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who became a sort of second father to him. Although he was intrigued by Realism, and worked alongside artists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, it was his interactions with Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet that proved pivotal, as he began to explore avant-garde movements. The “Salon des Refusés” (Salon of the Rejected) in 1863 showed Cézanne’s paintings, but rejected all his submissions every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882. At the beginning of 1869 he met a bookbinder’s assistant named Marie-Hortense Fiquet, who became his regular companion during the Franco-Prussian War. By 1875 he had given up exhibiting alongside the Impressionists, and his father discovered his illegitimate child with Fiquet a few years later, which resulted in his substantial allowance being cut off. Although he eventually married Fiquet and legitimized his son Paul, the growing political chaos in Europe and division amongst the Parisian artists led him to abandon Paris for good. Appreciation for his work grew during this time, although his friendships dwindled, and in his final years he was already acknowledged for his Post-Impressionist work, with future artists in the Cubist movement heavily indebted to him. On October 15th, 1906, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the fields outside Provence, and collapsed and lost consciousness. He contracted severe pneumonia and died a few days later, on October 22nd. Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were said to have remarked at separate times that Cézanne was “the father of us all.”