LONDON (AFP) — Britain's biggest single collection of paintings by the French artist Paul Cezanne is to go on display in its entirety for the first time from Thursday at London's Courtauld Gallery.
"The Courtauld Cezannes" runs until October 5, allowing visitors to see many works that are not on permanent display, alongside handwritten notes in which he reflects on the nature of his art to a friend, Emile Bernard.
The exhibition is the culmination of the Courtauld Institute of Art's 75th anniversary celebrations. The institute, set up by industrialist Samuel Courtauld, was Britain's first dedicated to the study of art history.
"Cezanne is the artist at the heart of our collection and of Samuel Courtauld's great project to assemble a collection of modern French paintings," said one of the curators, Barnaby Wright.
"It's the greatest collection by some distance in the United Kingdom, larger than the National Gallery and the British Museum together."
Major works in the collection include "Apples, Bottle and Chairback", a still-life watercolour from 1900-1906; "Montagne Sainte-Victoire" (circa 1887) and "Card Players" (circa 1892-5).
One of Cezanne's letters to Bernard was written shortly before his death in 1906 in which he said: "I have sworn to die while painting, rather than sinking into the degrading senility that threatens old men."
The exhibition traces Cezanne throughout his career, from northern Normandy, to near Paris, where he visited his friend, Camille Pissaro, and in his native Aix-en-Provence, in southern France.
Cezanne was one of the leading lights of the Impressionist school established in Paris in the 1870s, that used bold brush strokes and colour contrasts to embody the visual immediacy of the world around them.
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