Artist Paul Cézanne wanted to make paint “bleed”. The old masters, he said, painted warmblooded flesh and made the trees look warm and alive, and he would too. He wanted to capture “the green odour” of his Provence fields and “the perfume of marble from Saint-Victoire”, the mountain that was the subject of so many of his paintings. He was bold, spreading and slapping paint onto his still-lifes with a palette knife. “I will astonish Paris with an apple”, he boasted. In the years when his friends Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir were finally gaining acceptance, Cézanne worked furiously and mostly in isolation, ridiculed by critics and mocked by the public, sometimes tearing up his own canvases. He wanted more than the quick impressions of the Impressionists, and devoted himself to studying the natural world. He called himself a “slave to nature”, but he knew that he could never completely capture the natural landscape on canvas.