Paul Cézanne was a French painter, born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, who died there in 1906 and is now called the father of modern art.
For forty years he painted apples, card players, bathers and a single mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, building each picture from patches of color. The young painters who invented Cubism started from him.
How a painter of fruit and one mountain came to be treated as the start of modern art is partly a question of money. Cézanne was a banker's son, and he could afford to be ignored.
The usual story is simple. Paris laughed at him for forty years, the Salon, the official exhibition where French painters made their names, turned him away, he died poor and unknown, and only then did the next generation see what he had done. Most of that is true. The part about poverty is not.
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His father, Louis-Auguste, began as a dealer in felt hats, turned the trade into a fortune and in 1848 co-founded the main bank in Aix. Paul grew up in one of the richest houses in town.
That fortune came with a plan for the son. Louis-Auguste wanted a lawyer, and around 1859 Paul enrolled in law at the university of Aix, while spending every hour he could steal at the city's free drawing school.
His boyhood friend Émile Zola, close to him since they were thirteen and now living in Paris, wrote letter after letter urging him to come. In 1861 Louis-Auguste gave in and grudgingly agreed to a small monthly allowance. The money kept Cézanne dependent on a man he feared, and it would do so for most of his adult life.
Paris and a first defeat
Cézanne arrived in Paris that spring determined to become a painter, and his first months there would give his father every reason to think he had been right to want a lawyer.
What You'll Discover
Why his banker father's death freed him.
Why the Salon kept saying no.
The friend who put him in a novel.
The woman he hid from his father.
Why an apple and a mountain were enough.
How his last day of painting ended.