Critics compared Paul Cézanne's brushwork to a construction worker slopping wet cement with a trowel, and visitors to the 1874 Impressionist exhibition laughed at his canvases as a prank. This episode follows the anxious, isolated painter from Aix-en-Provence, where an authoritarian banker father pushed him into law school and a childhood friendship with Émile Zola fueled his dreams, to Paris in 1860, rejection by the academies, and the violent palette-knife paintings of his dark period.

We trace the calming mentorship of Camille Pissarro, the secret partner and son he hid from his father for years to protect his allowance, and the retreat to Provence where he broke the rules of linear perspective, painted objects from multiple angles at once, and built images from flat patches of color like a mason laying bricks. The conversation covers th ...