biography
pronunciation:
[sayzan]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1839–1906)
|
| biography:
| Postimpressionist painter, born in Aix-en-Provence, SE France. He studied law at Aix, then was persuaded by his friend Emile Zola to go to Paris (1862), where he began to paint. He was influenced by Pissarro, with whom he worked at Auvers and Pontoise (1872–3). He abandoned his early sombre Expressionism for the study of nature, and began to use his characteristic glowing colours. In his later period (after 1886), he emphasized the underlying forms of nature - ‘the cylinder, the sphere, the cone’ - by constructing his pictures from a rhythmic series of coloured planes, thus becoming the forerunner of Cubism. He obtained recognition only in the last years of his life. Among his best-known paintings are ‘L'Estaque’ (c.1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), ‘The Card Players’ (1890–2, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), and ‘The Gardener’ (1906, Tate, London). Picasso called him ‘the father of us all’. |
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