For the next couple of weeks, Hamilton's Benedict Leca will be at the centre of the North American art world.

He will step off a plane in Philadelphia Tuesday, rush through the airport and grab a cab to the prestigious Barnes Foundation gallery.

There, some 25 representatives of the media will be waiting for him to give them a tour of his new exhibition, The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne.

Leca has pulled off a major coup for a relatively small museum like the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Although the Cézanne exhibition opens in Philadelphia next week, it was pieced together by Leca on behalf of the AGH from private and public collections around the world.

"They're going to split up the reporters in two groups of 12 or so and we'll walk through the show and discuss," says Leca, director of curatorial affairs for the AGH. "We've heard from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post.

"I'll be speaking with Susan Stamberg on National Public Radio the following morning. (New York-based) Art News has already done a 1,000-word essay. The CBS Morning Show is interested too."

After a few days of media interviews, Leca will then deliver a lecture at a special VIP opening of the exhibit on June 20.

"The exhibition was organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, in a special collaboration with the Barnes Foundation, the only U.S. venue for the show," reads the invite to the VIP opening in Philadelphia.

In November, when it finishes its run at the Barnes, the Cezanne exhibit comes to its birthplace in Hamilton where it will be on display until Feb. 8 before the paintings are returned to the owners.

The Barnes, which is home to the largest collection of Cézanne paintings in the world, is merely playing a supportive role.

Because of a restrictive covenant in the Barnes Foundation trust that prohibits the loan of any of its paintings for exhibition, none of the Barnes's 69 Cézannes are included in Leca's exhibition.

In Philadelphia, the 21 Cézanne still-lifes that Leca has obtained will be in addition to the Cézannes already hanging on the Barnes's walls.

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The works of Cézanne, a French master who died in 1906, are some of the most sought after in the art world. Leca refuses to talk about the value of the paintings he has received on loan, but each one is likely rated in the tens of millions of dollars.

To put it in perspective, one Cézanne, part of a series known as The Card Players (not in this exhibit), reached an auction price estimated at more than $250 million in 2011, making it possibly the most expensive work of art ever sold.

"Cézanne is right up there with Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso," explains Leca. "Cézanne is right up there in the top five in the history of art, so any substantive exhibition on Cézanne is going to get a lot of press."

So the question has to be asked. How did Leca and the AGH manage to convince people to loan them these great works of art?

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Leca, 50, came to the AGH two years ago from a curatorial position at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Before that, he worked at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Fogg Museum at Harvard.

He holds a PhD in French painting from Brown University in Rhode Island. He accepted the chief curatorial position at the AGH because it was a step up.

He was well-loved in Cincinnati. After he accepted the job with Hamilton, a group of about 10 Cincinnati art lovers staged a protest at the museum, distraught the administration had not tried to better the AGH's offer.

Leca, his wife Leora Maltz-Leca (a Harvard Phd specialist in contemporary art) and their 22-month-old twins, Gabriel and Chiara, now live in the Locke Street neighbourhood.

Leca had started planning the Cézanne exhibition while still in Cincinnati. There had been many Cézanne exhibitions but he knew of none that focused solely on the French painters' still lifes.

"Cézanne still life is the last frontier," Leca says. "He's been done every which way, but nobody has really done his still life."

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More than 260 Cézanne still-lifes exist in dozens of collections around the world.

Leca likes exhibitions that are small, but high impact, quality over quantity.

He drew up a shortlist of about 30 Cézannes he'd like in the exhibit and then set about obtaining them. As rejection letters came in, Leca found himself revising the list several times.

"Museum business is a bit like horse trading," Leca says. "People are willing to loan if you've got a major Cézanne that they can borrow down the road. The Barnes doesn't loan and we (the AGH) don't have a Cézanne. So it was tricky. You just keep going round and round, talking to people and trying to convince them, begging, pleading and cajoling."

Leca drew on his many friendships and connections in the world of French art, including the chief curator at the Barnes, Judith Dolkart.

"She and I chatted, and I said that it would make sense," says Leca, who also convinced four of the world's top Cézanne experts to contribute articles to the exhibition's catalogue.

"I have a history with the material, I have the contacts and the knowledge, the Barnes has the prestige and it was a good union. We brought different things to the table and it worked."

The Barnes is paying the AGH a fee for the exhibition, as well as sharing in the cost of shipping, an expensive endeavour when dealing with 21 priceless works of art gathered from 12 public and four private collections based in Europe and North America. Leca found himself travelling extensively.

"I went to Paris and paid my respects at the Musée d'Orsay (an iconic Paris museum)," he says. "Then in January, 2013, I did a five-day road trip, drove across Switzerland and stopped at four different museums to make my case."

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Leca, who was born in France but moved with his family to Texas at the age of 10, told his new bosses about his ambitious plan for the Cézanne exhibition while negotiating his position with the AGH. They never blinked.

"I just explained to them, the only thing I'm interested in doing is going big," Leca says. "That's where I found that the objectives of the gallery were very parallel to my personal professional objectives which are to create substantive exhibitions that resonate out in the world.

"I've said it many times, this gallery is ambitious. It does a lot. They do more here with less than anywhere I've ever been," says Leca.

"This is just the beginning of what we have in mind for the Art Gallery of Hamilton."