(1839-1906) French Post-Impressionist painter. He was a leading figure in the development of modern art. He broke away from the Impressionists’ concern with the ever-changing effects of light to develop a style that tried to capture the structure of natural forms, whether in landscapes, still lifes, or portraits. Cardplayers about 1890–95 (Louvre, Paris) is typical of his work.
He was educated at the Collčge Bourbon of Aix (where he became the friend of Zola) and was intended for the law, but persuaded his parents to allow him to study art in Paris. He had, however, no regular training, failing in the entrance examination of the École des Beaux-Arts, and his early work had an undisciplined and Romantic enthusiasm for Delacroix, Daumier and Courbet, sensational subject matter (L’Orgie, L’Enlčvement) being rendered with violent and dark color, heavily plastered on the canvas. His real apprenticeship began in the 1870s when his friendship with Camille Pissarro brought him within the orbit of Impressionism. “Never paint”, Pissarro advised him, “except with the three primary colors and their immediate derivatives”, and though he did not follow this advice literally, it made him aware of the importance of pure color. A further result of Impressionist influence was to wean him from Romantic ideas and to confront him simply with the study of nature, La Maison du Pendu, which he contributed
to the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, marking a transitional stage in his art.
He found Paris unsympathetic, and his later life, the most creative phase, was spent largely in seclusion at Aix, though vivid descriptions of the sensitive recluse have been written by several devotees, notably the dealer Ambroise Vollard. Well-to-do and able to do what he liked after the death of his father, he absorbed himself in nature and the problems of his art, which contains many interesting and fruitful contradictions, the devotion to nature and a complete lack of interest in subject primary among them. He wished to “refashion Poussin after nature”: on the other hand, the Louvre, he remarked, was “a good book but only a means to an end”. A sense of structure, opposed to the atmospheric preoccupation of the Impressionists, dictated not only the representation of an object by planes translated into color, but the representation of space (as in his Montagne Ste Victoire). The beauty of his later paintings lies in the subtle gradations of transparent color from cold to warm, combined with and inseparable
from a grand simplicity of form. In the watercolor medium itself he showed remarkable brilliance and successfully applied its transparency in oil. As in his Joueurs de Cartes the human element was the result, but not the primary incentive, of his art, though he considered the study of the figure an important exercise and his many Bathers show a desire to achieve a great nude composition. The logic of his ideas inevitably tended toward still life, in which he excelled, and ultimately toward abstraction. In this respect he may be looked on as the progenitor of Cubism, which followed so soon after the retrospective exhibition of his work 1907.