For Picasso he was ‘like our father’; for Matisse, ‘a god of painting’. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is widely regarded as the father of modern art. In this authoritative and accessible study, Richard Verdi traces the evolution of Cézanne’s landscape, still-life and figure compositions, from the turbulently romantic creations of his youth to the visionary masterpieces of his final years. The painter’s biography – his fluctuating reputation and strained relations with his parents, wife and close friend Emile Zola – is vividly evoked using excerpts from his own letters and from contemporary accounts of the artist.