Paul Cézanne

For most of his life Paul Cezanne was the painter nobody wanted. He showed with the Impressionists in the 1870s, was mocked harder than any of them, then quietly withdrew to his home town of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France and more or less stopped exhibiting. He had one advantage the others lacked: his father was a wealthy banker, and an inheritance meant Cezanne could paint for decades exactly as he pleased, ignored, with no need to sell.

What he chased was the solid structure under the surface, the way a mountain or an apple actually holds together in space, rather than the Impressionists' fleeting light. From the 1880s he painted Mont Sainte-Victoire, the pale limestone ridge above Aix, over and over, around 80 times in oil and watercolour, each version flatter and more built from blocks of colour than the last. The younger painters who found him late, Picasso and Matisse among them, took those blocks and pulled them apart into Cubism, the fractured geometry of the next generation. Picasso called him "the father of us all."

His oldest friend was the novelist Emile Zola. They had grown up together in Aix, two boys who called their gang the Inseparables, and moved to Paris side by side. In 1886 Zola published a novel about a painter of great gifts who fails and kills himself. Cezanne read it, recognised a portrait of himself, sent Zola a short and formal note of thanks, and never spoke to him again. He worked on almost to the end outdoors; in October 1906 he was caught in a storm while painting, collapsed at the roadside, and died of pneumonia a few days later, at 67.