CŽzanne’s early works reveal something of his passionate, dreamy nature, but from his youth he made a determined effort to control his temperament. His childhood friend, ƒmile Zola, had lived in Paris for two years when CŽzanne arrived there to study, and Zola set him a strict timetable for his work. ‘From six in the morning until eleven you will go to a studio to paint from life. You will then have lunch, then, between noon and four in the afternoon you will copy a masterpiece of your choice in the Louvre or the Luxembourg.’ This rigorous programme suited the energetic and determined twenty-two-year old, who was nurturing the twin ambitions of entering the ƒcole des Beaux-Arts and of exhibiting at the Salon – the Salon de Bouguereau, as he called it. CŽzanne achieved neither ambition: he was rejected by all the official art establishments, and exhibited in the 1882 Salon only through the intervention of his friend, the painter Antoine Guillemet. In 1870, in an article in L’Album Stock, he explained this antagonism to a journalist. ‘I paint as I see, as I feel – and my feelings are very strong. They feel as I do and they see as I do, but they are timid and produce Salon art.’ His attempts, year after year, to submit his
