Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a wealthy banker, and became the most influential painter of the late nineteenth century — the artist who, in the words of both Matisse and Picasso, was “the father of us all.” His early work was dark, thickly painted, and sometimes violently expressive, but contact with the Impressionists, particularly Pissarro, taught him to lighten his palette and work outdoors. From this starting point, Cézanne spent the remaining three decades of his life pursuing a goal that no other painter had articulated: to “redo Poussin from nature” — to find an art that was both true to visual sensation and structurally solid.
His method was painstaking and revolutionary. Working slowly before the motif — a bowl of apples, a mountain, a group of bathers — Cézanne built his forms through carefully modulated patches of colour, each brushstroke a building block in a constructed architecture of planes and volumes. Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he painted over sixty times, becomes in his hands not a topographical record but a shimmering, faceted structure hovering between representation and abstraction. The Card Players (c. 1890–1895) reduces genre painting to monumental essentials.
Cézanne exhibited rarely and was little known outside a small circle of admirers until the retrospective exhibition at the 1907 Salon d’Automne, the year after his death. The impact was explosive: Braque and Picasso launched Cubism directly from his example, and virtually every major painter of the twentieth century has acknowledged his influence.