Naturalezas muertas de cezanne biography

Still life with fruit dish cézanne

The mastery of design, tone, composition and color that spans his life's work is highly characteristic and now recognizable around the world. His father, Philippe Auguste, was the co-founder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance.

Returning to Aix, he entered his father's banking house but continued to study at the School of Design. His attempt to work in his father's business was abortive, so in , he returned to Paris, where he stayed for the next year and a half. He retreated there, for instance, during the Franco-Prussian War The subject matter is brooding and melancholy and includes fantasies, dreams, religious images and a general preoccupation with the macabre.

His technique in these early paintings is similarly romantic, often impassioned. For his "Man in a Blue Cap" also called "Uncle Dominique," , he applied pigments with a palette knife, creating a surface everywhere dense with impasto. Though these early works seem groping and uncertain in comparison to the artist's later expressions, they nevertheless reveal a profound depth of feeling.

Each painting seems ready to explode beyond its limits and surface. Additionally, the somber, murky range of his palette began to give way to fresher, more vibrant colors. This historic exhibition, which was organized by radical artists who'd been persistently rejected by the official Salons, inspired the term "Impressionism"—originally a derogatory expression coined by a newspaper critic—marking the start of the now-iconic 19th-century artistic movement.