When Monet paints a landscape he paints the grass and the flowers and the trees one sees bathed in sunlight; when Cézanne painted a landscape it was an elemental presentment of nature herself.
Cézanne was born in Aix in 1839 and died in the same place in 1905.
Having inherited just sufficient to live very modestly, he devoted his entire life to trying to fathom the secrets of nature and paint her innermost truths.
The fact that his pictures did not sell, that even his friends did not understand him, did not swerve him a hair’s breadth from the path he had chosen—to paint, to learn how to paint, simpler and truer interpretations.
He lived so isolated from his neighbors that a visitor to Aix in 1904 had great difficulty in finding his residence; was obliged, in fact, to resort to the list of voters at the town hall. In the eccentricities of his daily life he was not unlike Turner, but in his art he indulged no such brilliant fancies.
He was a consistent painter. He never permitted his imagination to run away with him; he constantly checked his work by the closest and most penetrating observation of nature.
His manner of work is described by a devoted follower:[17]
He was working on a canvas showing three decapitated heads on an Oriental carpet. He had worked a month every morning from six o’clock until half past ten. His daily routine was, rise very early, paint in his studio from six to ten-thirty, breakfast, and go out immediately into the surrounding country to study nature until five. On his return he had supper and went at once to bed. I have seen him so exhausted by his day’s work that he could neither talk nor listen.
“What is lacking,” he said to me while contemplating the three heads, “is the realisation. Perhaps I shall get it, but I am old and it may be that I shall die without having reached the highest point: To realise! like the Venetians.”
Not unlike the lament of Hokusai at seventy over his imperfections as a draftsman.