For Picasso he was ‘like our father’; for Matisse, ‘a god of painting’. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is widely regarded as the father of modern art. In this authoritative and accessible study, Richard Ve

Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) was one of the towering figures of western painting and Baroque art, a technical master renowned for his focus on realism and startling veracity. Everything he painted was