Paul Cezanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter. He denied his father, a wealthy banker who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, to study art in Paris, where he became acquainted with the Impressionist artists. While he held deep admiration for the great contemporary painters, he broke away from the Impressionists because his artistic approach and philosophies differed from their own. After entering an isolationist period, he developed a style that focused on essential forms and masses that foreshadowed aspects of Cubism.

A deeply cerebral character, Cezanne explored questions of human perception by distorting color, shape, and perspective in his paintings. He would, for example, often paint a subject from different views in the same composition, melding the different perspectives in a way that defied realism. The stretch from his fifties to his early sixties was his most productive period, during which he painted numerous masterpieces. It was not until the last decade of his life that he found warm critical reception and public interest in his work. He died in 1906, at 67, leaving a transformative legacy. Picasso best summed up Cezanne’s influence on the next generation of artists when he declared him “the father of us all.”