Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was born in Aix-en-Provence on 19 January 1839, the son of a hatter who became a banker. At the Collège Bourbon he met Émile Zola, and the two boys became lifelong friends. To please his father he studied law, but in 1861 he gave it up and followed Zola to Paris to paint. There he met Camille Pissarro, whose example taught him to work from nature. The Salon rejected his submissions every year from 1864 to 1869.
He showed with the Impressionists in 1874 and again in 1877, and each time the critics were savage. After 1877 he withdrew and went his own way, spending most of his remaining years in Provence. His great subjects were the still life and the landscape around Aix, above all Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he painted again and again, building form out of patches of colour rather than outline. Late in life he painted portraits, card players and bathers. In 1886 he broke with Zola, who had put a failed painter, thought to resemble him, at the centre of a novel.
Recognition came very late. His first solo exhibition, at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in Paris, was in 1895, when he was fifty-six. Younger painters soon saw in him the master who pointed the way beyond Impressionism, and Cubism later claimed him as a direct ancestor. In October 1906 he was caught in a storm while painting outdoors, fell ill, and died in Aix on 22 October.