Paul Cézanne was the pioneer in the development of new painting possibilities. He was remarkable for his ability to perceive and paint aspects of everyday life in ways that revealed dynamic, yet deeply harmonious visions of the world. But the intellectual and emotional difficulties of his achievements were considerable. Mainly self-taught, most of his career was plagued by rejection. Both the critics and the public disliked his paintings, and in 1884 Cézanne declared that Paris, the centre of the nineteenth-century art world, had defeated him. He then retreated into a world filled with self-doubt and bad temper.