Paul Cézanne was sixty-seven when a thunderstorm caught him painting Mont Sainte-Victoire. October 15, 1906. He had worked the fields outside Aix-en-Provence for two hours when the rain turned violent. He kept painting. He collapsed, unconscious, in the mud between his easel and the road. A laundry cart driver found him and hauled him home. Pneumonia took hold that night. He died a week later.
In the days between collapse and death, Cézanne kept getting out of bed to paint. The morning after the storm, he walked to his garden studio to work on a portrait of his gardener. His housekeeper carried him back inside. He wrote a furious letter to his paint dealer demanding a shipment of burnt lake pigment. The man was dying and his rage was directed at late supplies.
He had been rejected by the Paris Salon for nearly two decades. The jury dismissed his submissions from 1864 through the late 1870s, year after year. One painting slipped through in 1882, and that required a ruse: his friend Antoine Guillemet sat on the jury and claimed Cézanne as his pupil, exercising a privilege that let jury members exhibit one student’s work without review. They hung the portrait high in a dim corner. The privilege was revoked the following year.
