Paul Cezanne was born January 19, 1839.  His father was a rich bourgeois, and while he was disappointed when his son refused to prosecute further his law studies, he, being a sensible parent and justly estimating Paul’s steadiness of character, allowed him to go to Paris in 1862, giving him an income of a hundred and fifty francs a month, which was shortly after doubled.  With sixty dollars a month an art student of twenty-three could, in those days, live comfortably, study at leisure, and see the world.  Cezanne from the start was in earnest.  Instinctively he realised that for him was not the rapid ascent of the rocky path that leads to Parnassus.  He mistrusted his own talent, though not his powers of application.  At first he frequented the Academie Suisse, where he encountered as fellow-workers Pissarro and Guillaumin.  He soon transferred his easel to the Beaux-Arts and became an admirer of Delacroix and Courbet.  It seems strange in the presence of a Cezanne picture to realise that he, too, suffered his little term of lyric madness and wrestled with huge mythologic themes—­giant men carrying off monstrous women.  Connoisseurs at the sale of Zola’s art treasures were astonished by the sight of a canvas signed Cezanne, the subject of which was L’Enlevement, a romantic subject, not lacking in the spirit of Delacroix.  The Courbet influence persisted, despite the development of the younger painter in other schools.  Cezanne can claim Courbet and the Dutchmen as artistic ancestors.

When Cezanne arrived in Paris the first comrade to greet him was Zola.  The pair became inseparable; they fought for naturalism, and it was to Cezanne that Zola dedicated his Salons which are now to be found in a volume of essays on art and literature bearing the soothing title of Mes Haines.  Zola, pitching overboard many friends, wrote his famous eulogy of Manet in the Evenement, and the row he raised was so fierce that he was forced to resign as art critic from that journal.  The fight then began in earnest.  The story is a thrice-told one.  It may be read in Theodore Duret’s study of Manet and, as regards Cezanne, in the same critic’s volume on Impressionism.  Cezanne exhibited in 1874 with Manet and the rest at the impressionists’ salon, held at the studio of Nadar the photographer.  He had earlier submitted at once to Manet’s magic method of painting, but in 1873, at Auvers-sur-Oise, he began painting in the plein air style and with certain modifications adhered to that manner until the time of his death.  The amazing part of it all is that he produced for more than thirty years and seldom sold a canvas, seldom exhibited.  His solitary appearance at an official salon was in 1882, and he would not have succeeded then if it had not been for his friend Guillaumin, a member of the selecting jury, who claimed his rights and passed in, amid execrations, both mock and real, a portrait by Cezanne.