Carpenter of colour

On Monday 15 October 1906, Paul Cézanne was painting on the hillside above his Les Lauves studio on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence when he was caught in a violent rainstorm. Having sacked his coachman the week before in a row over money, the 67-year-old painter was on foot, and by the time he was picked up by a passing laundry cart and driven home to his house in Aix he was soaked to the skin. On the Tuesday, after rising at dawn to continue work on a portrait of his gardener Vallier, he collapsed into bed, and on the following Monday his wife and son were summoned from Paris. They arrived too late — according to local gossip, Mme Cézanne hadn’t wanted to miss a fitting with her dressmaker. Within five weeks of his death from pneumonia on 23 October, Hortense Cézanne and young Paul had cleared out the artist’s studio; within five months they had sold off the contents to the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard for the substantial sum of 275,000 francs.

Why the unseemly haste? Hortense was a high-maintenance woman, and she may have felt that the surprise success her painter husband had achieved in the last decade of his life couldn’t last. Certainly, it made no sense to keep the works in Provence. For despite his growing reputation in avant-garde Paris, the local image of Cézanne as a holy fool who had sacrificed his considerable advantages in life to artistic ambitions he couldn’t fulfil was firmly rooted in the soil of his native Aix. Henry Pontier, director of the local museum where the young Cézanne had conceived his passion for art and in whose school he had first studied drawing, had even sworn in public that the painter’s work would only enter the collection over his dead body.