Born in 1839, the son of a wealthy banker, Paul Cezanne was provided with the best of everything money could buy, including a fine education. At the age of ten, Paul entered the Saint Joseph boarding-school, where he studied drawing. At the same time, on demand of his father, Cezanne also attended a law school but after deciding law was not his calling, and against the wishes of his father, Cezanne committed himself to becoming an artist and in 1861 headed for Paris. Eventually, his father reconciled with Cézanne and supported his choice of career, financially supporting him for most of his artistic life.

In Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionists, and formed a close friendship with Camille Pissarro. Pissarro exerted a formative influence on the younger artist. Over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together led to a collaborative working relationship.

Although Paul Cézanne was influenced by the Impressionists, he was not an Impressionist. This is a fact that he himself was certain of. Even though he considered the study of nature essential to painting, he lacked the ability to capture fleeting moments with paint and believed color and form to be inseparable, features he felt were neglected by Impressionism. He had a certain ability to organize and recreate a feeling after dissecting, investigating and replaying it. He always maintained an element of realism, showing great strength and vitality, a love of color and painterly handling in the structure of his paintings.

Cézanne used color, construction, and integration to create his works of art. In many of his early works, he depicted dark, imaginary subjects in a violent, expressive manner. He exploited the use of paint in varying degrees to pull the viewer's eye into his painting and walk them through like the reading of a book. He avoided the use of glazes, much like his Impressionistic peers, and used lead white in most of his color mixtures to increase their luminosity as well as durability. Many paint layers were built up wet over dry but then, many others were worked wet into wet. Alternating cool and warm colors were used and left for the eye to mix. Solid forms and monumental shapes are often stacked up like walls and are all tightly interlocking. There is an inherent tension in his paintings, between flatness and naturalistic illusion. These were all features that Cezanne would carry throughout his career and ultimately mark him as a master of painting and a key figure in Post-Impressionism.

Cézanne's had trouble getting his paintings accepted into the Salon shows. His first paintings were in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, a display of works rejected by the Paris Salon. In fact, the Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869 but he continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882. In later years a few individual paintings were shown at various venues, until in 1895, a the Parisian dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave the artist his first solo exhibition. Cézanne chose to work increasingly in isolation, usually painting in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris.

Cézanne died in 1906, and in 1907 his paintings were exhibited in Paris in a large scale museum-like retrospective. The retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly impacted the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the nineteenth century and to the advent of Cubism. His explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Gris, and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and, eventually, to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th Century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.