Paul Cézanne (pawl say-zahn) was born in Aix-en-Provence, France. He began studying art as a teenager and eventually entered the Académie Suisse in Paris to continue his art studies. While completing his studies in Paris, Cézanne often visited the Louvre, where he was influenced by the works of Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, and Delacroix.

In the early 1860s, Cézanne began to paint with the Impressionists. Their interest in color and light influenced Cézanne a great deal. Although he painted with the Impressionists, Cézanne soon began using color in strikingly different ways. Even in his Impressionist paintings, he emphasized shapes as well as color and light. By the late 1870s, he was using shades and gradations of color to create solid images unlike those of the Impressionists. Cézanne still linked his painting to nature, but he saw in nature something different from what other painters saw. For Cézanne, nature could be depicted in geometric shapes—especially the cylinder, sphere, and cone. He used these shapes in his paintings to present the underlying structure of trees, rocks, mountains, and even the objects in a room.

In his later years, Cézanne withdrew from his family and friends and lived near Aix-en-Provence. In the series of landscape paintings he created of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby mountain, Cézanne's even brushstrokes and cubes of color give the viewer a sense of depth in the painting.