On October 22, 1906, Paul Cezanne died at his home in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, at the age of 67. He had been caught in a thunderstorm a few days earlier while painting outdoors, and he collapsed and was carried home, and he developed pneumonia. He had been working to the end. The end came fast. His studio was full of canvases that few people had seen.
He was born in Aix in 1839, the son of a banker, and he studied law before going to Paris to paint, where he met Camille Pissarro and the group that became the impressionists. He showed in their exhibitions in 1874 and 1877, and then withdrew and worked largely on his own in the south, in Aix and at a quarry near the village of Estaque and on the mountain of Sainte-Victoire, which he painted many times. He was a difficult and shy man, and he quarrelled with his friend the writer Emile Zola in 1886. The break was final.
His method was to build a picture out of patches of colour and repeated strokes rather than out of lines and shading, and he worked slowly and from nature, and he left many canvases unfinished. Dealers found him hard to sell. The sales were few. In his last years a younger generation of artists, including Picasso, Braque and Matisse, began to collect his work and to treat him as a teacher, and a large exhibition of his paintings was held in Paris in 1907, a year after his death.
The 1907 show had a wide effect. The way he broke a form into flat planes, and his use of several viewpoints in one picture, were taken up by the cubists, and the colours and the structure of his landscapes influenced painters for decades. His studio in Aix is now a museum. Paintings by him that once went unsold now bring very large sums at auction.