Paul Cezanne (1839 to 1906) was a banker's son from Aix en Provence who became the painter modern art grew out of. The most surprising fact about him is how his closest friendship ended: the novelist Emile Zola published a book in 1886 about a failed painter, and Cezanne is said to have never spoken to him again.
The two had grown up together in Aix. By 1886 one of them was among the best known writers in France, and the other was still almost unknown in Paris. The book was L'Oeuvre, and its hero, Claude Lantier, is a painter who fails and ends the story by hanging himself from his scaffolding.
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That is the story in every biography, and it is a good one, because Lantier has often been compared to Cezanne. A man recognizes himself in a friend's novel, writes a short note of thanks, and walks out of that friend's life.
Then, in 2013, another letter turned up. Cezanne wrote it in 1887, a year after the book appeared, and it is friendly. The scholar Robert Lethbridge studied it and published his findings in 2014, and a reviewer of his work sums up the result in one sentence: the letter put an end to the speculation that the novel had severed the friendship. If the book did not end it, something else did.
What really ended the friendship between Cezanne and Zola?
Politics, according to Lethbridge…
What You'll Discover
The son he hid from his father.
The first solo show critics mocked.
The sitter who had to be an apple.
The storm he kept painting through.