Paul Cezanne Self-Portrait A.I. #035 NFT

French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne was one of the most influential artists in the history of modern painting. His works and ideas influenced the aesthetic development of 20th-century artists and art movements like Cubism and Fauvism. Cézanne was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence, France to a well-off bourgeois family. He began painting in 1860 in his hometown and later studied in Paris. Dominated by dark colors, Cézanne’s early paintings like Paul Alexis Reading a Manuscript to Émile Zola were influenced by the expressive brushwork of Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. At the same time, he was influenced by the Realism of Gustave Courbet, who was known for his unsentimental treatment of commonplace subjects. During his formative years, Cézanne became closely associated with Impressionist painters Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This also influenced his artistic style: he brightened his color palette and used short brushstrokes that were characteristic of the Impressionist painting technique. The artist’s Impressionist period is best embodied in paintings like The House of the Suicide and A Modern Olympia – that was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Because his work was largely rejected by the public, Cézanne grew more isolated, cutting his ties with the Impressionist movement. From the late 1870s, he spent most of his time in the South of France, occasionally returning to Paris. From the late 1870s to the early 1890s Cézanne worked in relative isolation and developed his mature style. From that point, he focused on painting still-lifes, landscapes, and later, portraits. In his still-life paintings, Cézanne rejected a dark palette and intense contrasts of light and shadow in favor of a more muted palette and subtle transitions between color tones. In Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses , exemplifying Cézanne’s mature style, the artist builds the form and volume of the objects through subtle gradations of color. He also abandons the traditional signal-point perspective, painting objects from multiple perspectives. Cézanne painted many landscapes, mainly near his hometown, Aix-en-Provence, for example, Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley and Montagne Sainte-Victoire . In these paintings, Cézanne attempted to synthesize between a faithful depiction of the subject and the feelings the landscape inspired.