Paul Cézanne

About Paul Cézanne's Paintings

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French Post-Impressionist painter who spent most of his working life in relative obscurity, painting in and around his native Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. He was temperamentally unsuited to the social machinery of the Paris art world — impatient, self-critical, perpetually dissatisfied — yet he kept working with a rigour and patience that became legendary. His stated ambition was to 'make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums.' He succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation.

Cézanne's formal investigations — multiple simultaneous viewpoints, tilted picture planes, the building of form through small directional brushstrokes rather than smooth modelling — gave Picasso and Braque the foundation for Cubism. Matisse called him 'the father of us all.' He painted the same Mont Sainte-Victoire more than sixty times, the same modest arrangements of apples and tablecloths dozens of times, and in the repetition discovered things about the structure of perception that painting had not previously articulated.

Famous Paintings by Paul Cézanne

• Mont Sainte-Victoire series (1882–1906) — sixty-plus views of his obsession
• The Card Players series (c. 1890–95) — monumental simplicity
• The Large Bathers (1906) — his final great statement
• The Basket of Apples (c. 1893)
• Still Life with Apples and Peaches (c. 1905)
• Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1888–90)
• Portrait of Madame Cézanne (1885–87)
• Harlequin (1888–90)
• The Bridge of Maincy (1879–80)
• The Bather (c. 1885)

Why Paul Cézanne Paintings Endure

Cézanne's paintings endure because they changed what painting was allowed to do. Before him, a picture had to give the viewer a single, coherent, photographically plausible space. After him, a picture could be honest about the fact that the eye constructs what it sees — that we look at a table from slightly above and from slightly in front simultaneously, that an apple's roundness is partly seen and partly inferred, that colour and structure are not separate problems. Every major movement of twentieth-century art — Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Abstraction — worked with tools he had invented.

His still lifes have a philosophical intensity that their modest subjects do not immediately suggest. A rumpled tablecloth, a few apples, a jug: Cézanne spent days on these arrangements, working out in paint a theory of how the eye organises sensation into form. The results look deceptively simple and reward extended looking as few other paintings do.

Paul Cézanne Art Prints on Mojud

Mojud holds a collection of Cézanne's works spanning his early dark Romantic canvases, the Impressionist-influenced landscapes, the great still-life series, the Card Players, and the late Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings. Every work is available at full resolution to explore and download for free, or to order as a fine-art print made to order in our studio.

• Paul Cézanne works available in the collection
• Free high-resolution downloads — no account needed
• Museum-grade fine-art prints, made to order
• Ships across India

Frequently Asked Questions

• What are Paul Cézanne's most famous paintings?

  Cézanne is best known for his Mont Sainte-Victoire series (over 60 paintings), The Card Players series (c. 1890–95), The Large Bathers (1906), and his still lifes featuring apples and tablecloths — especially 'The Basket of Apples'. He reportedly said he wanted to 'conquer Paris with an apple.'

• Why is Cézanne called the father of modern art?

  Cézanne broke with the single unified viewpoint of traditional perspective, showing objects from multiple simultaneous angles and building form through colour rather than line. This approach gave Picasso and Braque the foundation for Cubism; Matisse, the licence for Fauvism. His investigations of how the eye constructs space became the grammar of twentieth-century painting.

• What is Cézanne's relationship to Impressionism?

  Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists in the 1870s but grew dissatisfied with what he saw as their lack of structure and permanence. He wanted to achieve the solidity of the Old Masters while retaining the direct observation of nature that Impressionism had opened up. His mature work is Post-Impressionist — it begins where Impressionism ends and goes further.

• Where are Cézanne's original paintings kept?

  Major collections are at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, near where he lived and worked, also holds significant works.

• Can I download Cézanne paintings for free from Mojud?

  Yes. All Cézanne works in the Mojud collection can be downloaded in high resolution at no cost. No account is required.