Nationality: French

Birthdate: 19 January 1839

Date of Death: 2 October 1906

GMC Ranking: 4

Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century and whose work formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th century Cubism.

While his early artworks were influenced by Romanticism – such as the murals in the Jas de Bouffan country house – and Realism, Cézanne arrived at a new pictorial language through intense examination of Impressionist forms of expression. He altered conventional approaches to perspective and broke established rules of academic art by emphasizing the underlying structure of objects in a composition and the formal qualities of art. Cézanne strived for a renewal of traditional design methods on the basis of the Impressionistic color space and color modulation principles.

Like most artists with different philosophies than their peers, Cézanne, for most of his career, had little recognition and he was even mocked for his techniques and choices of subjects. But near the end of his life, his impact on the art world began to bloom into what we know Cézanne to be today. When you look at the context of his life along with what his shifts in techniques were, you can uncover why Cézanne was simply a bit ahead of his time.