Paul Cézanne

The son of a banker and a boyhood friend of the novelist Émile Zola, Cézanne showed with the Impressionists before withdrawing to his native Aix, where he pursued the structure of painting in solitude.

He advised treating nature “by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”, reducing objects to planes of colour and geometric form. Picasso and Matisse both called him “the father of us all”.