One of our favourite new arrivals is Cezanne A Biography by John Rewald. It is a beautifully produced book with fantastic colour reproductions but in a world with so many books on Cezanne this one stands out because it was written by the foremost authority on late 19th-century art and Cezanne in particular.

John Rewald was born Gustav Rewald in Berlin in 1912. In 1932 he want to France to complete his studies.At the Sorbonne he wrote his dissertation on the friendship of Zola and Cézanne. When France declared war on Germany in 1939, he was interned as an enemy alien. He emigrated to the United States in 1941 and Alfred Barr, director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, was his sponsor. From 1943 on, he consulted for the Museum of Modern Art, organizing exhibitions for it and other museums and researching his magnum opus, a history of Impressionism. The History of Impressionism was published in 1946 to universal acclaim and remains the standard work on the subject.

As a devoted Cézanne scholar, Rewald was instrumental in creating a foundation to save Cézanne's studio and turn it into a museum. It is now a permanent museum in Aix-en-Provence, L'atelier Cézanne, and can be viewed as it was at the painter's death. The citizens of Aix, in gratitude to Rewald, named a street after him.

Rewald, a highly cultured and erudite man and a renowned writer, was the product of four distinct civilizations: the pre-World War I Wilhelmine German Empire, the Weimar Republic of Germany, the French Third Republic in its final years, and America in the latter half of the 20th Century. He is famous not only for his solid scholarship, and the ground-breaking treatment of his subject, but also for the beauty and lucidity of his prose which, invariably sober and scholarly, never departing from the factual, rises at times to a culminating lyricism.

We feel very fortunate in being able to offer this book.