Paul Cezanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter known as the father of modern art, was a proud, prickly and increasingly reclusive man whose genius went largely unrecognized for much of his life, only to be widely misunderstood when the world finally could no longer ignore it.
His fame now is so great that it is almost impossible for us to view his art with fresh eyes - let alone through the eyes of his contemporaries of the late 1880s and 1890s. A major retrospective of his work, opening today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, offers us the chance to try anew.
