...the area of Aix and ...

Paul Cézanne, after a phase of uneasy dissension among the Impressionists, withdraws from the movement in 1878 in order “to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums.”

In contrast to the passing show depicted by the Impressionists, his approach imbues landscape and still life with a monumental permanence and coherence.

He abandons the Impressionists' virtuoso depiction of evanescent light effects in his preoccupation with the underlying structures of natural forms and the problem of unifying surface patterns with spatial depth.

Again rejected by the Salon, Cézanne moves in 1878 to Aix-en-Provence, where he has to endure the insults of his tyrannical father, whose financial help he needs to survive since his canvases are still not finding buyers.

He works in Aix and ...

Paul Cézanne had exhibited Portrait of M.L.A. at the Salon as a “pupil of Guillemet.”

He has spent most of the year in Paris, but had visited Émile Zola at Médan, and returns to Aix in October where he works at the Jas de Bouffan.

Paul Cézanne spends most of the year around Aix; from May to November he works in L'Estaque, and meets up with Renoir and Monet working on the Riviera.

Paul Cézanne works in L'Estaque, Aix and Cardanne.

During June and July, he takes his family to stay with the Renoirs at La Roche-Guyon, and visits Zola in Médan.

During this period, he paints a number of striking landscapes, including the prismatic work The Mills of Gardanne (c. 1885).

Paul Cézanne, now forty-seven, completes Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan (1885-86; Minneapolis Museum of Art).

In depicting the winter-bare chestnut trees, which line an avenue on the grounds of his family estate at Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne employs multiple viewpoints; this collapses depth, meshing the two parallel rows of trees into a web that seems to exist in one plane.

This characteristic innovation produces a rhythmic synthesis of form in both two and three dimensions.

In April, he finally marries Marie-Hortense Fiquet (Madame Cézanne en bleu, c. 1886, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), his mistress of seventeen years and the mother of his son.

He receives an inheritance following the death of his father six months later.

Paul Cézanne, now financially independent, spends most of 1887 working in and around Aix.

Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir paint together at the Jas de Bouffan in Aix and at ...

Paul Cézanne spends the summer in Switzerland and returns to Aix in the autumn, but begins to suffer from diabetes.

Paul Cézanne works in Aix, Paris and in the forest of Fontainebleau.

The Card Players portrays a theme that Cézanne ultimately treats in five different versions.

Except for the card-player paintings, in which the sober dignity of the men is well expressed, there is no attempt in Cézanne's portraits to hint at the sitter's character.

In most cases he treats the background with the same care as the subject and often violently distorts facial color to bring it in harmony with the total composition.

Albert Aurier describes him as an important forerunner of Symbolism.