Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877, then withdrew to Provence, aiming, as he put it, to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums. He built form from small parallel strokes and shifts of warm and cool colour rather than from line and shadow, and he let a table edge or a horizon break where the picture needed it.

He returned to the same motifs for decades: Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from the hills above Aix, apples on a rumpled cloth, The Card Players (early 1890s), bathers in a landscape, ending with The Large Bathers (c. 1898–1905). Landscapes outnumber everything else in his work. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso studied him closely after the memorial exhibition of 1907.