Still Life with Apples

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Still Life with Apples: Paul Cezanne

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Cezanne Oil Painting - Still Life with Apples

Keywords: Life, Apples

Work Overview: Still Life with Apples
Paul Cézanne
1898
Oil on canvas
27 x 36 1/2" (68.6 x 92.7 cm)

With Still Life with Apples, Cézanne demonstrates that still life—considered the lowliest genre of its day—could be a vehicle for faithfully representing the appearance of light and space. “Painting from nature is not copying the object,” he wrote, “it is realizing one’s sensations.”

Cézanne consistently draws attention to the quality of the paint and canvas—never aiming for illusion. For example, the edges of the fruit in the bowl are undefined and appear to shift. Rules of perspective, too, are broken; the right corner of the table tilts forward, and is not aligned with the left side. Some areas of canvas are left bare, and others, like the drape of the tablecloth, appear unfinished. Still Life with Apples is more than an imitation of life—it is an exploration of seeing and the very nature of painting.

Cézanne was fascinated by optics and tried to reduce naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials—the cone, the cube, the sphere. He used layers of color on these shapes to build up surfaces, outlining the forms for emphasis. His deep study of geometry in painting led him to become a master in perspective. Until the end of his life, Cézanne received little public success and was repeatedly rejected by the Paris Salon. In his last years, and particularly after his death, his work began to influence many younger artists, including Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Still Life with Apples demonstrates that the genre of still life can be a vehicle for faithfully representing not only objects but also the appearance of light and space. Painting from nature is not copying the object, Cézanne wrote, it is realizing ones sensations. He consistently drew attention to the quality of the paint and canvasnever aiming for illusion. For example, the edges of the fruit in the bowl are undefined and appear to shift. Rules of perspective, too, are broken; the right corner of the table tilts forward and is not aligned with the left side. Some areas of canvas are left bare, and others, like the drape of the tablecloth, appear unfinished. Still Life with Apples is more than an imitation of lifeit is an exploration of seeing and the very nature of painting.

Throughout his life, the French painter Paul Cézanne returned again and again to the still life. Encompassing small—scale domestic scenes rather than grand public ones, still life was considered the lowliest of genres by the French Royal Academy, the official arbiter of great art in the nineteenth century. Yet in Still Life with Apples, Cézanne proved that this modest genre could be a vehicle for thinking through the Impressionist project of faithfully representing the appearance of light and space. "Painting from nature is not copying the object," he wrote, "it is realizing one's sensations."

Cézanne consistently draws our attention to the quality of the paint and canvas, and we never lose ourselves in illusion. For example, the edges of the fruit in the bowl are hard to define, appearing to shift before our eyes. Cézanne's scene defies the rules of linear perspective (a system for creating the illusion of space on a flat surface, wherein every object is seen from a single, fixed point of view) and instead gives us shifting views. The right corner of the table tilts forward, and fails to align with the left side; the pitcher, the bowl, and the glass all tilt to the left, as if magnetically drawn to the curtain. Even though the artist worked on this painting for a number of years, some areas of canvas are left bare, and others, like the drape of the tablecloth on the right edge of the table, appear unfinished. Still Life with Apples is more than an imitation of life—it is an exploration of seeing and the very nature of painting.

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Paul Cezanne

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