He failed the entrance examination to the Academy of Fine Arts. The Salon jury rejected his work eleven years running. His father — a wealthy banker of Aix — thought his son was wasting his life on nonsense. His one loyal friend, Zola, ended by writing a novel about him, in which he appears as a failed genius.
Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839. He was no brilliant student and no man of society. He was stubborn, shy, irritable. And he worked like a man possessed.
His question was this: how to render a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface — honestly, without tricking the eye with perspective? He looked at an apple and saw not merely an apple but a body in space. A single still life could occupy him for months. Rotting fruit. A patient housekeeper willing to sit for hours.
Mont Sainte-Victoire is visible from Aix. He painted it more than sixty times — not because he could not find the right angle, but because each time he found a new question.
His contemporaries, the Impressionists, painted impression, atmosphere, light. Cézanne wanted something more durable. "I want to make of Impressionism something solid, like the art of the museums."
Picasso, Braque, Matisse — all of them called him the father of modern art. Cubism came straight out of his apples and his mountain.
He died in 1906 after catching a chill while painting in the rain in the open air. He had stayed in the field to finish the landscape.