Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born 19 January 1839 in France and started with Romantic murals and Realist scenes before falling into the orbit of the Impressionists. Then he broke away, obsessively reworking how perspective and structure could be shown - not through academic rules but through color planes and small, repetitive brushstrokes that built complex fields. Critics mocked the work; fellow painters like Camille Pissarro saw something else. The dealer Ambroise Vollard gave him a solo show in Paris in 1895, and by the late 1890s the ridicule began turning to recognition. He died 22 October 1906, but his method of breaking objects into underlying geometry had already set the path for Cubism and the avant-garde that followed.