Cézanne and Impressionism

Cézanne arrived in Paris as an educated 22 year old from a well-to-do family in Aix-en-Provence, passionate about art, with an erratic, contrary temperament. There, he was privately taught, having arrived just as his contemporaries (later called “Impressionists”) Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Claude Monet were trying unsuccessfully to be accepted by the official Salon juries. Cézanne went his own way, scornful of Modernist convention. He studied older art in the Musée du Louvre; his heroes were nonconformist artists of the previous generation, chiefly Gustave Courbet and Eugène Delacroix. The kindly Camille Pissarro attracted him to the suburban countryside and to painting out of doors. During the 1870s, Cézanne developed his distinctive kind of Impressionism, applying it to still life and portraiture as well as landscape. Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund and the John Walsh Lecture and Education Fund.