Few artists have exerted such an influence on modern art as Paul Cezanne (19 January 1839 - 22 October 1906). Picasso, Braque and Matisse all acknowledged a profound debt to his painting. This reassessment of Cezanne’s life and art discusses the key events, artistic relationships and friendships that shaped his work and places his painting in the context of the debates about art and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It details the reception of Cezanne, his early life and career, the crucial moment of artistic development from the 1870s to the mid-1880s, and the period from 1886 to 1906 when we see important changes in his choice of motif, style and working methods that characterize his late oeuvre.

The book explores key personal and artistic relationships that influenced him: his close friendship with the author Zola, his artistic dialogue with Manet, whose work he both emulated and critiqued in a series of paintings in the 1870s, and the close collaboration with Pissarro during the 1870s, as well as his association with the Impressionists.