978-1-4222-3257-6

cézanne

Cézanne A Biography

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(Mary Evans/Epic/Tallandier)

 above:  Portrait of the French painter Paul Cézanne in 1904 in Aix en Provence.

his son a lifetime of financial security – a situation often not available to artists in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, although he did have several years of financial hardship. While Cézanne’s father would at first reject his son’s ambitions, his mother, whom he resembled, gave him encouragement and support. She was a vivacious woman who sent Paul and his two younger sisters to school in the family’s hometown of Cesana (now West Piedmont).

The name Cézanne may well have been Italian in origin, but Paul Cézanne was born to French parents in Aix-en- Provence, in Provence in the South of France, on January 19, 1839. His parents, Louis-Auguste Cézanne (1798-1886) and Anne Aubert (1814-1897), had their newborn son baptized just over a month after his birth, in the local parish church. Cézanne’s father was a former milliner, turned banker, who co-founded a prosperous firm that afforded