Did you know Paul Cézanne was self-taught?

Paul Cézanne (1839 –1906) was a French Post Impressionist painter whose work introduced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century and formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th-century Cubism. 

Cézanne was largely a self-taught artist. After moving to Paris, he attempted to enter the École des Beaux-Arts twice, but was turned down, so he made frequent visits to the Louvre, where he copied works by Titian, Rubens, and Michelangelo. He also regularly visited the Académie Suisse, a studio where young art students could draw from the live model for a modest monthly membership fee. While there, Cézanne met fellow painters Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, who were also struggling artists, but who would soon comprise the founding members of the Impressionist movement, just coming into existence.

While his early works were influenced by Romanticism, Cézanne arrived at a new pictorial language through intense examination of Impressionist forms. He altered approaches to perspective and broke established rules of art by emphasizing the underlying structure of objects in a composition. 

Cézanne’s often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and recognizable. He used planes of color and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne’s intense study of his subjects. One of my favorites is Le Vase Bleu.

His paintings initially provoked incomprehension and ridicule in contemporary art criticism. In 1895, an aspiring art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, opened Cézanne’s first solo exhibition in his Paris gallery, which led to a broader examination of Cézanne’s work. Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne “is the father of us all.”

During his lifetime, most of the residents of Aix mocked Cézanne. However, recently, they named a university after their world-famous artist. In 1973, it was founded in Aix-en-Provence, The Paul Cézanne University with departments of law and political science, business administration as well as natural sciences and technology. In 2011, it was dissolved and combined with the other two universities in Aix and Marseille to form the University of Aix-Marseille.

In addition to oil paintings and watercolors, Cézanne left behind an extensive collection of more than 1200 drawings, which, hidden in the cupboards and folders of the studio during his lifetime only began to interest collectors in the 1930s. 

In 2025, Aix-en-Provence rolled out a €30 million ($35,000,000) campaign branded “Cézanne 2025,” including trademarking his name, showcasing 130 works at Musée Granet, (officially accredited by the French government), opening his studio and restored residences, and partnering globally to borrow rare pieces. Ten major Cézanne paintings are presented in a room dedicated to him. 

In 1999, the painting, once owned by Paul Gauguin, was sold at Sotheby’s for $60.5 million, (It was bought by American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur and investor, Kenneth Cordele Griffin)making it the most expensive still life painting ever sold at an auction.

in 2011, one of the five versions of Cézanne’s The Card Players was sold to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price estimated at between $250 million ($357.8 million today) and possibly as high as $300 million ($429.4 million today).