Pfirsiche und Birnen

Cezanne painted these peaches and pears around 1890, when he was in his early fifties and still largely unknown to the public, working mostly alone in Provence. A plain white cloth, a few pieces of fruit, a wooden table, and yet he treats the arrangement like a construction problem, tilting the tabletop up toward you and letting the near and far edges refuse to line up, so your eye keeps quietly readjusting. Each fruit is built from small patches of warm and cool colour rather than smooth shading. Within about 20 years canvases exactly like this were being hunted down by the Moscow merchant collectors Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, which is how this one travelled to Russia. It hangs today in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.