The artist Paul Cézanne. While his friends were roaming the countryside inventing impressionism, Cezanne remained some what realistically rooted in nature, wanting to capture “the green odor” of the fields of Provence.

Cézanne painted a lot of apples. I enjoy painting still lifes, specifically produce. It’s simple and honest and beautiful; just painting the objects as best I can.

Paul Cézanne wanted to make paint bleed. The old masters, he told the poet Joachim Gasquet, painted warmblooded flesh and made sap run in their trees, and he would too.

He wanted to capture “the green odor” of his Provence fields and “the perfume of marble from Saint-Victoire,” the mountain that was the subject of so many of his paintings. He was bold, scraping and slapping paint onto his still lifes with a palette knife. “I will astonish Paris with an apple,” he boasted.

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century.

Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso thatCézanne “is the father of us all” cannot be easily dismissed.

Cézanne’s work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable.

He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature.

The paintings conveyCézanne’s intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

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