Art Minute: Happy Birthday Paul Cezanne!

Born in Aix-en-Provence, France on Jan. 19, 1839, French painter, Paul Cezanne, was one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself. He has been called the father of modern painting.

Paul Cézanne, French (1839–1906)

Maison Maria with a View of Château Noir
c. c. 1895

Oil on canvas
, 25-5/8 x 31-7/8 in. 

Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas


Provençal buildings with stucco walls and red-tiled roofs—often, as here, observed from a road turning into the picture—formed one of Cézanne’s favorite subjects.


By the late 1870s, Cézanne had devised his hallmark manner of applying color in short parallel strokes, no differently for objects than for empty space. Here the distinctive way in which the trees are rendered with jagged broken lines, along with the density of the sky, relates stylistically to paintings that he made in 1895 at a quarry near the Château Noir.

It was at the Château Noir, an unfinished and abandoned nineteenth-century building complex in the Gothic style, visible in the right background of the Kimbell painting, that Cézanne stored his art supplies beginning in 1887. 

Landscapes such as this, in which Cézanne shows corners of rural France with simple domestic buildings, were to be a major source of inspiration for Braque and Picasso, and by extension for Cubism and early twentieth-century art. -Notes from the Kimbell's web page




On a sunny day last October, CCS's upper grade students traveled to Ft. Worth and were fortunate to see this Cezanne painting during our tour of the Kimbell's permanent collection.

(Both photos were taken in the natural light diffused into the space by a series of baffles. Carter Wiseman, author of Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, said that "the light in the Kimbell gallery assumes an almost ethereal quality, and has been the distinguishing factor in its fame ever since." So very true.)