NOT long after his death in 1906, Cézanne was already being hailed by a younger generation of artists and critics as a great innovator who had paved the way for Cubism, which seemed the perfect embodiment of his advice to ‘see in Nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone’. Yet anyone who had visited his studio in the 1860s, when he was in his mid twenties, would have been astonished to learn that he would come to be regarded as the grandfather of a radical-art movement that appeared to dispense with references to Nature altogether. On his easel, they would have seen technically crude portraits of family and friends and dramatic figure compositions captured in thick swirls of black and brown paint that gave little hint of the carefully constructed and colourful canvases of his maturity.
Cézanne did not have the precocious virtuosity of many great artists, but he had stubbornness and single-mindedness. His determined struggle to capture his own sensations on canvas—what later generations would praise as his ‘anxiety’ or ‘unease’—was what led
