THE ARTISTS’ ARTIST

In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George, the character of Dot, an artist’s model, sings to the painter Georges Seurat, “Give us more to see!” Dot’s understanding of her companion’s creative process and her urgent plea to the artist—for whom she endured the punishing physical rigors of her work—applies equally to the painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), one of the most influential artists of the past two centuries.

Cézanne’s world, geographically anchored in the villages and cities of southern and central France—from his birthplace at Aix-en-Provence to the artistic locus of Paris—provided diverse and compelling subjects for an artist who became a transformative force in the development of modern art. Essentially self-taught, Cézanne lived solely for painting, choosing its isolation and inscrutable demands over a comfortable existence in a society whose rules he firmly rejected. He was compelled to pursue and reinvent the drama of the visual world on canvas—the atmosphere of changing weather surrounding his beloved countryside of Provence, patterns of light