Painting techniques of the masters

Paul Cézanne (1839 - 1906)

Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence. He arrived in Paris in 1861 where he met and worked with Pissarro, who introduced him to open air landscape painting. It was because of his association with Pissarro that Cézanne lightened his palette and his passionate subject matter gave way to more imaginative scenes culminating in his later studies of bathers.

Using the Impressionist ideals of colour and landscape and his wish to bring a sense of permanence and monumentality, Cézanne developed his 'constructive' style of brushwork, where separate parallel strokes, sometimes with a diagonal bias, were used to describe structural solidity. He would either choose a neutral grey light which would give the truest impression of colour, or a diagonal sunlight which gives landscapes a calm stability.

Cézanne would often use pale grounds which would be visible through gaps in the paint. Cream grounds would be warmed by the placement of adjacent cool tints. In his later landscapes, Cézanne used these pale grounds to create the highlights. He would experiment with thin overlaid layers of transparent water colour which were incorporated into his oil paintings, by contrast in other works he would build up oil colour in great relief from the canvas with the densest part following the contours of solid areas. Cézanne would use cool colours for the shadowy areas whilst the warm colours were used to create the form. He used interlocking planes of subtly modulated, contrasting colours to create the complex spatial arrangements in his paintings.

Cézanne has a slow and methodical way of painting, sometimes taking years to complete a work, returning to it often to make adjustments. When reworking a painting Cézanne would sometimes come at it from a different standpoint. He revised perceptions of the subject would be incorporated into the painting making it even more complex.