Paul Cezanne (January 19, 1839 - October 22, 1906) was a French artist, a painter (Postimpressionist) whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th Century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th. Cezanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th Century Impressionism and the early 20th Century's most startling new line of artistic enquiry, namely Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cezanne "...is the father of us all..." cannot be easily refuted.

Paul Cezanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive, tentative, delicate and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and instantly recognisable, almost as clearly recognisable as handwriting. Using planes of colour and small repeated brushstokes that build up to form complex fields at once a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye, and an abstraction from observed nature, Cezanne's paintings convey intense study of his subjects, a repeated and searching gaze, and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

Life and work

Paul Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, one of the Southernmost regions of France, on 19 January 1839. Provence is a varied and complex region geographically, comprising several limestone plateaux and mountain ranges to the East of the Rhone valley. The climate is hot and dry in summer, and quite cool in winter. Altitudes range from lower lying areas to some quite impressive mountain peaks, and these more mountainous areas have characteristic pine forests and limestone outcrops. Cezanne clearly absorbed his surroundings wholeheartedly, and developed a lifelong love for the Provençal landscapes which later became his chief subjects of study.

From 1859 to 1861 Cezanne studied law in Aix, and developed his early love of art by taking drawing lessons. Going against the objections of his father, he committed himself to pursuing his artistic development and left Aix for Paris with his close friend emile Zola in 1861. Eventually, his father reconciled to his son's choice of career and supported him in this. Cezanne later received a large inheritance from his father, on which he could continue living a comfortable life.

In Paris, Cezanne met Pissarro and the other Impressionists. Pissarro was to influence Cezanne's painting over the years and they often painted together.

Cezanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape, and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landcape, imaginitively painted. Later in his career he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting that was to influence the impressionists enormously. In Cezanne's work we see a development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting, in which the visual field is broken down into small, often very regular brushstrokes that build up the image in planes and areas of colour. His famous words, "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums", seem to indicate that his struggle was to develop a hitherto unknown authenticity of observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find, and this, for him, involved breaking the surface of the painting into small, often repetitive strokes of the brush. He structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes to provide the maximum amount of information in the image of his observed subject.

Cezanne's geometric essentialisation of forms was to influence Pablo Picasso's, Georges Braque's, and Juan Gris' cubism in profound ways. When one examines closely the Cubist paintings together with Cezanne's late work, it is immediately clear that a direct link exists between his work and the later discoveries of Cubism. The key to this link is the depth and concentration that Cezanne applied to recording his observations of nature. We have two eyes, and therefore possess binocular vision. This gives rise to two separate views of the world, which are simultaneously processed in the visual cortex of the brain, and provide us with depth perception, and a complex knowledge of the space which we inhabit. Try for a moment staying still and closing one eye, then closing the other and opening the first. This gives a good illustration of the idea. It is difficult to perceive depth with only one eye, and we have to rely on another perceptual sense, the sense that distant objects appear smaller than close objects. This becomes unreliable when we do not know what an object is, and therefore cannot guess the sort of size it should be. The essential aspect of binocular vision that Cezanne employed and became influential on Cubism was that we often "see" two views of an object at the same time. This led him to paint with a varying outline that at once shows the left-eye view and the right-eye view. Cubism took this a step further and Picasso, Braque and Gris experimented with not simply two simultaneous views, but with multiple views of the same subject.

Cezanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refuses in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Paris Salon rejected Cezanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869.

Cezanne exhibited little in his lifetime and worked in increasing artistic isolation, remaining in the South of France, in his beloved Provençe, far from Paris. He concentrated on a few subjects: still lifes, studies of bathers, and especially the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, of which he painted many times.

Although religious images appeared less frequently in Cezanne's later work, he remained a devout Catholic, and said -When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.�

To early 20th-century modernists, Cezanne was the founder of modern painting. Pablo Picasso called him "the father of us all".

Cezanne and Zola disagreed, and never reconciled, over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cezanne in the novel L'Œuvre (The Masterpiece, 1886).

In 1906, Cezanne collapsed while painting outdoors during a thunderstorm. One week later, on October 22, he died of pneumonia.

On May 10, 1999, Cezanne's painting Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier sold for $60.5 million, the fourth-highest price paid for a painting up to that time.