Paul Cezanne Sketchbook 1875 1885 PDF Download

Unlike many other artists of his period who painted in only one area of composition, Cezanne was adept at many areas of composition including landscapes, still lifes, nude studies, and portraits. The artist completed many portraits, often using models from real life as his guides. He employed a light style that was related to his direct observation of his subject, as indicated by the lightly amused looks on Madame Cezanne's face and her engaged postures. His paintings are also indicative of his use of small color planes. Rather than completing the painting with realistic depth and shadow, he illustrates the figures as if they are in a singular dimension, employing the use of one color for each area of the composition.From Cezanne's home in Aix-en-Provence, Southern France, where he spent many of his later years painting, he developed a special relationship with the landscape of the Provence and painted many renditions of it, especially the mountain Sainte-Victoire in the background. The paintings clearly illustrate the way Cezanne sought to depict the nature of reality and our perception of it. The mountain gives way to simple forms, and the buildings in the foreground have been devolved into their particular shapes, all the while keeping the entirety of the landscape intact. Cezanne's use of light and color give the impression that it is not his renderings of the landscapes that give them their fragmented quality, but that it is an inherent quality of the landscapes itself. 'The Bathers' (1900) is the largest in a series of nude bather paintings by Cezanne (see back cover), and is often referred to as the 'Large Bathers' or 'Big Bathers' to distinguish it from the other bather scenes painted by Cezanne. It is also considered one of the masterpieces of modern art, as well as Cezanne's finest painting. It was purchased for $100,000 for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was criticized for the expenditure because at the time ten percent of Philadelphia's population was without bathtubs. The nude figures in the painting have been compared to Picasso's later work 'Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon,' suggesting the influence that Cezanne had on the painters of the period.