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Impressionism & Post-Impressionism
Paul Cézanne - Biography
From National Gallery of Art, Washington.:
Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence on January 19, 1839, the first child of a prosperous hatter, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, who later became a banker. Paul, as the only son, had his career path chosen for him by his father, who decided that the young man should become a lawyer and prepare to manage the nascent family fortune. By 1857, however, Cézanne had begun to take classes at the Free Drawing School attached to the Musée d'Aix (now the Musée Granet). Yielding to paternal pressure, he registered at the Aix law school the following year, but he had already settled on a life as an artist.
In 1861 Cézanne abandoned his legal studies and made his first visit to Paris, encouraged by his boyhood friend, the novelist Émile Zola. Paris was the center of the art world, an essential destination for any up-and-coming artist, and Cézanne made repeated trips to the capital over the next dozen years, absorbing much that proved foundational to his subsequent artistic accomplishments. He frequented the Salon, studied the old masters and copied Delacroix at the Louvre, and forged friendships with many important artists, including Edouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, and Henri Fantin-Latour. But it was Camille Pissarro who became a pivotal, lifelong influence on Cézanne after the two met in the early 1860s at the Académie Suisse in Paris.
You can see more complete information in the source:
National Gallery of Art, Washington.