Having inherited just sufficient to live very modestly, he devoted his entire life to trying to fathom the secrets of nature and paint her innermost truths. The fact that his pictures did not sell, that even his friends did not understand him, did not swerve him a hair’s breadth from the path he had chosen--to paint, to _learn how_ to paint, _simpler_ and _truer_ interpretations. He lived so isolated from his neighbors that a visitor to Aix in 1904 had great difficulty in finding his residence; was obliged, in fact, to resort to the list of voters at the town hall. In the eccentricities of his daily life he was not unlike Turner, but in his art he indulged no such brilliant fancies. He was a _consistent_ painter. He never permitted his imagination to run away with him; he constantly checked his work by the closest and most penetrating observation of nature. His manner of work is described by a devoted follower:[17] He was working on a canvas showing three decapitated heads on an Oriental carpet. He had worked a month every morning from six o’clock until half past ten. His daily routine was, rise very early, paint in his studio from six to ten-thirty, breakfast, and go out immediately into the surrounding country to study nature until five. On his return he had supper and went at once to bed. I have seen him so exhausted by his day’s work that he could neither talk nor listen. “What is lacking,” he said to me while contemplating the three heads, “is the _realisation_. Perhaps I shall get it, but I am old and it may be that I shall die without having reached the highest point: To realise! like the Venetians.” Not unlike the lament of Hokusai at seventy over his imperfections as a draftsman. [Illustration: CÉZANNE Still Life] One’s first impression from even half-tone reproductions of his paintings is a feeling of _construction_. I have before me a still-life--the fruit, the bowl, the piece of stuff are not simply painted but _built up_ as firmly and scientifically as a builder builds a house--the materiality as well as the beauty is there. It is just the same with his portraits, his figure pieces and his landscapes; one cannot escape the _sense of the substance_, the fundamental reality. And to attain it all he used the simplest and most direct technic, not a brush-stroke, not a line, not a spot of color wasted. It was these characteristics which made him a profound Impressionist, in the wider significance of the term, but also the first of the _Fauves_, the father of the revolt from Impressionism in its more superficial significance. * * * * * With the name of Cézanne are associated the names of two men whose work shows his influence, VanGogh and Gauguin, and one whose work is wholly different, Henri Rousseau, the custom house employee who painted without instruction; later, but also conspicuously, Henri Matisse.