Paul Cézanne — 1 Memories of Youth

1. 1. Cézanne's sister Marie claimed his earliest drawing of the Pont de Mirabeau at age five revealed his future as a painter, but such origin stories were conventional and his actual emergence as an artist was a long struggle.
2. 2. The 19th-century conception of childhood as a formative, innocent period, influenced by Rousseau, shaped Cézanne's nostalgia and his later artistic attempts to revive a lost past.
3. 3. Cézanne's father Louis-Auguste was a shrewd milliner and moneylender who took over Aix's only bank in 1848, amassing a considerable fortune by 1870.
4. 4. Cézanne remained fearful of his authoritarian father throughout his life, dependent on his modest allowance until his father's death in 1886, when he was almost fifty.
5. 5. Cézanne's mother Anne-Élisabeth was his sole source of unconditional support for his artistic ambitions, in contrast to his father's opposition.
6. 6. At the Collège Bourbon, Cézanne met Émile Zola and defended him from bullies, forging an intense friendship that Zola later fictionalized in Madeleine Férat.
7. 7. Art historian Meyer Schapiro suggested that Cézanne's fascination with Virgil's second Eclogue and his painting The Amorous Shepherd allegorized his homoerotic bond with Zola, though their letters also express fantasies about women.
8. 8. After Zola moved to Paris in 1858, Cézanne fell into deep despair, writing that he felt 'overwhelmed by a gloomy sorrow' and turned to drinking.
9. 9. Cézanne's bathers paintings, especially Baigneurs au repos (1876–77), were his way of revisiting memories of his youthful nude swimming with friends, depicting figures isolated in private reverie.
10. 10. Cézanne's early artistic training at the École spéciale de dessin in Aix was under the strict traditionalist Joseph Gilbert, whom Cézanne later called a 'bad painter' and another domineering father figure.
11. 11. Zola lured Cézanne to Paris in 1861 with tales of bohemian life and available models, but Cézanne's self-doubt about his painting abilities persisted.
12. 12. Cézanne's capacity for doubt, which threatened his early career, later became the foundation of his artistic legacy, as argued by philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.