A few years before his death in 1906, Cézanne began to be recognized as a great modern master by the avant-garde artists of a younger generation; one of them, Maurice Denis, expressed their sentiments in traditional fashion by painting a Homage to Cézanne (1900) in which a group of admirers cluster round the great man's works Within a few more years, before the outbreak of World War in 1914, his paintings had begun to be accepted by the Louvre.

While his artistic heirs, the Fauves and the Cubists, were ensuring that critics should continue to be outraged, Cézanne's work had become not only 'solid and durable' but also part of the revered 'art of the museums.

Forsaking Parisian art circles for Provence, he turned to landscape, still lifes and portraits. He endeavoured to interpret rather than reproduce the scenes around him, using rich luminous colours instead of the heavy ones of his youth. His portraits, mainly of local people or his wife and friends, concentrate on the outward identity of his subjects, not the inner character.

Like his still lifes, they are attempts to balance colour and design; total realism is sacrificed in the interests of perfect pictorial unity.

In this and other concepts he is the forerunner of the Cubists, but his influence has spread far beyond them to become one of the most powerful in the art of the last hundred years.