Paul Cézanne
Cezanne rented a top-floor room in this seventeenth-century Marais house in 1865, in the years of repeated Salon rejection. The painter Francisco Oller was in the same building.
22 rue Beautreillis
Still standing
Outside only
Someone else
The seventeenth-century Marais mansion where Paul Cézanne took a top-floor room in 1865, in the years when the Salon was rejecting him annually and almost nobody thought he could paint.
- 22 rue Beautreillis, 75004 Paris
- Cézanne rented a garret room here in 1865
The place, briefly
In 1865 Paul Cézanne was renting a small room high in this seventeenth-century house in the Marais. His friend the Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller was in the same building.
These are the hardest years. Cézanne submitted to the Salon and was rejected, submitted again, was rejected again, and kept submitting for the better part of two decades with a persistence that his contemporaries found either heroic or ridiculous. The early work is dark, thickly loaded and often violent in subject, painted with a palette knife and nothing like the calm structural pictures of his last decades.
The Marais in the 1860s was not the expensive quarter it is now. It was a working district of workshops and cheap rooms in decayed aristocratic houses, which is exactly what a painter with an allowance from a disapproving father could afford.
The building stands, and its period architecture is intact. It is private.
Key facts
- 1865
- A garret near the top of the house
- The painter Francisco Oller
- Annual Salon rejections and the dark, palette-knife early work
- A seventeenth-century Marais hôtel particulier
- Private — exterior only
Timeline
Cézanne rents a top-floor room at 22 rue Beautreillis.
He submits to the Salon repeatedly and is rejected almost every year.
On the map
Questions before you go
What was Cézanne painting in 1865?
The early dark work — heavily loaded, often applied with a palette knife, with violent or romantic subjects. It looks almost nothing like the structural landscapes and still lifes of his later career.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
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