Stillleben, Rose und Früchte

This small still life of a rose and a little fruit hides an odd secret. It was once part of a larger canvas that Cezanne left unfinished, and sometime in the early 1900s a dealer simply cut the picture in two and sold the halves separately. Its other half, Flowers in a Blue Vase, hangs a few rooms away in the same building, the Orangerie in Paris. For decades no one realised the two belonged together. Dominique, the widow of the collector Paul Guillaume, bought this piece without knowing it matched a Cezanne her husband had already owned. A curator only pieced the story back together in 1992. Look at the fruit and you can watch Cezanne ordering it by colour, running from orange through to blue.