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Reclusive Painter Gets Belated Recognition

Paul Cezanne died after contracting pneumonia in October 100 years ago. During his life he only had a few exhibitions in his home country and none across the channel. A century on and the National Gallery will go some way to putting this right when it hosts a major retrospective of his work, bringing together 40 of his oil paintings, all held in British collections. He was shy, reclusive, a bit gruff but probably not as unpleasant as some would have us believe. Hardly anyone knew of him while he was alive but now he is recognised as one of the 19th century`s greatest oil painters.

Cezanne`s influence on subsequent artists was phenomenal. Often called the father of modern art, he was a bridge between the Impressionists and the Cubists, he hugely influenced the likes of Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Braque, Kandinsky and Mondrian. The image of Cezanne as unfriendly is not borne out when you find he spent a lot of school days larking about with his great chum Emile Zola, or that one of his best friends, a man he used to go on painting trips with, was Camille Pissarro.

He was an innovator taking liberties with shape and form unheard of in his day. Anne Robbins, assistant curator of 19th century oil paintings at the National Gallery, called the exhibition, which opens in October, "terribly exciting". The exhibits will cover all aspects of Cezanne`s artwork, the portraits, the exquisite still-lifes, the landscapes and the bathers. Between the 1870s and his death C?zanne explored the theme of naked bathers in about 200 artworks, inspired by his love of the Renaissance and the studies he made in the Louvre of the likes of Titian and Giorgione.