Cézanne detached himself increasingly from his contemporaries in these years to grapple with the great, still unfathomable paintings of his gardener, of the Mont St Victoire and of imaginary bathers by the local river. An early chapter of this ambitious and absorbing biography explores the artist’s relationship with Zola, two young hopefuls who cast themselves as shepherds from Virgil’s Eclogues. Danchev ends his last chapter with a moving evocation of the painter at work on the riverbank surrounded by a crowd of spectral shapes, like the importunate Virgilian shades reaching out to posterity from the bank of the Styx in The Aeneid. Cézanne put it more bluntly in his last words to his son, written on the day he caught a fatal chill by the river in 1906: “All my compatriots are a-------s beside me.”