Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French painter from Aix-en-Provence, usually grouped with the Post-Impressionists. He studied law before committing to art and moved to Paris in 1861. The École des Beaux-Arts turned him away, and the Salon rejected his submissions for years. He exhibited with the Impressionists in 1874 but later withdrew from the group and worked mostly in Provence, where a studio at Les Lauves was built for him in 1902–03. Cézanne built his pictures from patches of colour and simplified forms rather than from soft atmospheric effects. His subjects included still lifes with fruit, the landscape of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he painted repeatedly from 1885 until his last years, and the figure studies known as The Card Players and The Bathers. The dealer Ambroise Vollard gave him his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1895. Cézanne died in Aix in 1906. Matisse and Picasso both acknowledged his influence on modern art.