Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French painter whose stubborn experiments helped bridge the gap between Impressionism and the modern art of the twentieth century. Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, he trained as a lawyer to please his banker father before giving it up for painting. For years his work was mocked and rejected, so he retreated to the south of France and worked in near isolation, endlessly studying the same apples, tabletops, and the local mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire.

His big idea was to build a picture out of small, deliberate patches of color, treating nature as if it were made of simple underlying shapes. That approach looked clumsy to many at the time, but it opened the door for Picasso and the Cubists, who both later called him a kind of father figure. Cézanne kept painting almost to the end, dying in 1906 after being caught in a storm while working outdoors.