Paul Cézanne stood at his easel outside Aix-en-Provence on October 15, 1906, and went on painting while a thunderstorm broke over him. He was sixty-seven. He stayed out in the rain for hours, started for home, and collapsed on the road. The driver of a laundry cart found him and carried him back to town.
The next morning he went out to the garden of his studio to work on a portrait of his gardener. He came back in a state of collapse. Two days after the storm he wrote the last letter of his that survives, and it went to a shopkeeper. Pneumonia killed him a few days later.
By the scoreboard France kept for its painters, he had spent most of his life losing. The Paris Salon was the official exhibition, and a jury chose what hung there each spring. Starting in the 1860s, that jury refused what Cézanne sent for the better part of two decades. In 1866 he asked the superintendent of fine arts for a second exhibition of rejected work, like the one the state had allowed in 1863. The reply called that show inconsistent with "the dignity of art" and said it would not be repeated.
The Salon hung one canvas of his, in 1882, when he was forty-three. His friend Antoine Guillemet sat on the jury that year and used a juror's privilege to pass a single work by a student, so the catalogue listed Cézanne as "pupil of M. Guillemet." An early biographer wrote that the organizers placed the portrait where no eye could find it.
A year after his death, the Salon d'Automne in Paris hung fifty-six of his works as a memorial. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Léger walked through the rooms, and within two years Picasso and Braque had begun to build Cubism on what they saw. Matisse is remembered as calling Cézanne "the father of us all." Picasso called him "my one and only master."
A jury had beaten him at one game for most of his life, and all that time he had been playing another.
