Paul Cézanne, born in 1839, who painted quietly up to his death in 1906, is the unrivalled modern artist’s modern artist, called the “greatest of us all” by Claude Monet. The most intimate proof of this is how many of his successors have felt the need to move in on his patch – literally. When Picasso told his dealer Ambroise Vollard he had just bought “Cézanne’s mountain”, Vollard thought he meant one of his canvases of Mont Sainte-Victoire. In fact Picasso had purchased an estate on its slopes in the south of France.
