Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne spent his life painting the same apples, the same mountain and the same wife, and in doing so laid the foundation of twentieth-century art. Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, the son of a hat-maker who became a banker, he was pushed into law and given a small allowance to paint, on which he lived for decades. His schoolfriend Émile Zola drew him to Paris. His early work was dark, thickly loaded and often violent in subject, and was rejected by the Salon almost every year for twenty years. Camille Pissarro taught him to work outdoors and lightened his palette, and he showed with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877 to particularly savage reviews. He then broke with them. Impressionism dissolved objects into light; Cézanne wanted the solidity of the old masters without giving up direct observation. He built form from patches of colour laid side by side, each carrying a shift in plane, and he allowed perspective to be inconsistent — a tabletop tilted forward, a bowl seen from two angles — because that is closer to how a person looking at a still life actually accumulates it. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire more than sixty times, and the Bathers repeatedly. He worked extremely slowly; a portrait sitter was required to stay motionless for over a hundred sessions, and he once told one to sit like an apple. He lived in near obscurity until a dealer's exhibition in 1895. Matisse and Picasso both called him the father of us all, and Cubism proceeds directly from him. He collapsed painting outdoors in a storm and died in 1906.

• Lived: 1839 CE – 1906 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter