He altered conventional approaches to perspective and broke established rules of academic art by emphasizing the underlying structure of objects in a composition and the formal qualities of art.
He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. His painting initially provoked incomprehension and ridicule in contemporary art criticism. His parents married on 29 January , after the birth of Paul, and his sister Marie in His youngest sister Rose was born in June His mother, Anne Elisabeth Honorine Aubert β , [ 12 ] was "vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offence". They debated art, read Homer and Virgil and practiced writing their own poems.
He spent two years with his unloved studies, but increasingly neglected them and preferred to devote himself to drawing exercises and writing poems. His teacher was the academic painter Joseph Gibert β In August he won second prize in the figure studies course there.
His father bought the Jas de Bouffan House of the Wind estate that same year. This partly derelict baroque residence of the former provincial governor later became the painter's home and workplace for a long time. Going against the objections of his banker father, he committed himself to pursue his artistic development and left Aix for Paris in There he met Camille Pissarro , ten years his senior, and Achille Emperaire from his hometown of Aix.
He often copied at the Louvre from works by old masters such as Michelangelo , Rubens and Titian. But the city remained alien to him, and he soon thought of returning to Aix-en-Provence. Over the course of the following decade, their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise , led to a collaborative working relationship between equals. In June he wrote to their childhood friend Baille: "Paul is still the excellent and strange fellow I knew at school.
