Paul Cézanne

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The Basket of Apples. Apples spill from a tilting basket, the plate sits askew, and the front of the table runs on a different level from the back: one still life that refuses to look through a single eye at once. Its distortions fed Fauvism and Cubism, and it belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Mont Sainte-Victoire. The limestone mountain that stands over his home town, painted and drawn until the count ran to some eighty canvases and watercolours. Here the ridge is mass rather than silhouette, built of strokes that keep their distance and their weight, a motif worked at until it became an argument about seeing itself.

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La Maison du pendu, Auvers-sur-Oise. Crooked houses stacked along a lane at Auvers, the village north of Paris where he painted beside Pissarro. Shown at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, it was the first picture he ever sold to a collector.

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La Femme à la cafetière (Woman with a Coffeepot). A woman who likely worked as a servant at the family estate of Jas de Bouffan, painted around 1895 not for her character but for her forms: body, cup and pot pared down and locked into a grid of uprights and levels, the tabletop tipped at its own angle. That plain geometry heralds Cubism.

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Apples and Oranges. Fruit, crockery and rumpled cloth on a table that leans toward the viewer, painted around 1899 and now at the Musée d'Orsay. It reuses the same objects as a canvas finished a few months before it, today in the Hermitage.

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Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier. Curtain, jug and fruit bowl in a composition of about 1893, ruled by balance and symmetry. The fruit looks thrown down by chance; nothing is, and the shifting viewpoint is the real experiment.

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Pont de Maincy. A bridge at Maincy, near Melun where he was then living, its stone arch and its trees built stroke by stroke out of greens and greys rather than drawn. The picture hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

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Lady in Blue. His governess, Madame Brémond, seated in blue: among the last portraits of a woman he painted, made around 1900 and kept today in Saint Petersburg. Its tones and shapes lean forward into Fauvism and Cubism before either movement had begun.

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Jeune Fille au piano (Girl at the Piano - The Overture to Tannhauser). Two young women at the keyboard of the family house near Aix, usually read as his sisters, in a picture of 1869 named for the Wagner overture the pianist is playing. It reached the Hermitage from Ivan Morozov's collection in Moscow.

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Still Life with Onions. Onions, chosen for their roundness, set with a knife laid at an angle, a bottle, a glass and a plate before a nearly bare ground. The angled knife is an old trick of depth out of Chardin, and the whole spare arrangement points the way to Cubism.

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Portrait of Peasant. One of the open-air portraits of Aix country people from his last years: a man in the plain blue of a Provençal peasant, seated with crossed legs and a stick by the terrace rail of his final studio, perhaps his gardener Vallier. The pose is quiet, and the figure monumental, with a dignity the old masters would have recognised.

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View of Auvers-sur-Oise. A spread of northern landscape painted in 1879 and 1880, some years after he had left Auvers; the exact spot has never been pinned down. Its first owner was Victor Chocquet, the collector who backed him early, and it came to the Ashmolean in Oxford in place of inheritance tax.

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Peaches and Pears. A still life of 1888 to 1890, bought from Vollard in 1912 by Ivan Morozov, nationalised with his collection in 1918 and moved to Moscow's Pushkin Museum in 1948. A closely related canvas hangs in Oslo.

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Along the Banks of the Marne. River country of 1888, the far bank and the villa above it held in the same unhurried planes of colour. It came from Morozov's Moscow collection into the Hermitage.

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Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from near Gardanne. The mountain again, seen from the country southwest of Aix in a canvas of 1886 to 1888, the houses of the valley tucked under the ridge. It reached Washington's National Gallery of Art as the gift of the Harriman family foundation.

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Houses by the Road II. A road bending out of the picture past houses and a wall, painted around 1881, when he was turning Impressionist colour toward something more solid. It hangs in Tel Aviv on long-term loan from the collection of Moshe and Sara Mayer.

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Marion et Valabrègue partant pour le motif. Two figures striding out of an autumn landscape in 1866: the painter friends of the title, Marion and Valabrègue, off to find a subject to paint. An early figure piece, small in size and blunt in its dark palette, once owned by the collector Auguste Pellerin and now in Mexico City.

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Still Life with Apples. A still life of about 1890, kept today in the Hermitage, where it came from the collection of Otto Krebs. Fruit as architecture: each apple placed and tilted until the table beneath it seems to tilt too, the ordinary subject made monumental by sheer weighing of form.