Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne.

Paul C?zanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. His unique method of building form with color and his analytical approach to nature influenced the art of Cubists, Fauves, and successive generations of avant-garde artists. Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that C?zanne 'is the father of us all'.

The light of Impressionism resonates in this work, but signs of a revised palette are especially apparent in his muted tones. After rejecting the intense contrasts of light and shadow of his earlier years, he developed his refined system of color scales placed next to one another. His often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of color and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields with distorted perspectival space. The subject of his painting are rendered without use of light or shadow, but through extremely subtle gradations of color. C?zanne ignores the laws of classical perspective, allowing each object to be independent within the space of a picture while the relationship of one object to another takes precedence over traditional single-point perspective.