To answer these questions, we must first understand the artist himself and how his life transformed his art. Cézanne is known today to many as not only the “most important post-impressionist” but as the artist that “put an end to the four centuries reign of imitativeness painting” according to Charles Harrison in Modernity and Modernism French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Harrison 151, 158). His lasting legacy in large part was due to Cézanne’s obsession with perfection (Harrison, 204). He was rarely, if ever, satisfied with himself and, despite his frustration, consequently persisted to create the sensations in his forest images in the late watercolors. (Rewald, 20/ Donnell 64). To create these sensations he distorted and transformed the images that he painted, but while he danced close to abstraction, he was never known as an abstract artist (Donnell, 66). He did, however, use a complete geometricization of forms changing basic nature scenes into pragmatic structure of lines and shapes (Donnell 65). Kurt Badt explained Cézanne’s “type” of painting by saying that he “painted the sea as an unbroken surface…houses as boxes without joints, rocks as blocks, trees with smoothly closed outlines, men as fruits as persistently motionless,” (Badt, 158). Basically, he took the life of the object away: the sea without waves, houses without curves, trees without textured bark. Badt also justified Cézanne’s objectification, as well as his progression towards the basis of Cubism, by explaining that “just as space is the universal medium in which objects are disposed and become intelligible to men, so cylinders, spheres, cones, and cubes are basic shapes by means of which the diversity of matter can be reduced to simple terms and therefore united,” (Badt, 158). This is clearly a true depiction of Cézanne’s style. In these two quotations, Badt clearly identifies the greatest irony in Cézanne’s watercolors but also why that irony is necessary for Cézanne’s style. Badt explains that Cézanne extracts the life from objects while simultaneously returning the objects to their most basic form from which the sensations that nature produces come. The use of the geometric shapes carried strongly into his later watercolors, especially his forest scenes, where the connections to Cubism are most vivid.