Pyramide aus Schädeln

By the time Cezanne stacked these four skulls on a bare tabletop, around 1899, he was in his late fifties, living quietly in Aix-en-Provence and increasingly cut off from the Paris art world. His diabetes was worsening, several close friends had died, and he had grown preoccupied with his own end. He kept real skulls in his studio and painted them again and again in these final years. Here he treats them the way he treated apples and mountains, as solid weights built up in patient planes of ochre and grey and packed tightly into a shallow space. There is no candle, no inscription, none of the old props that told earlier viewers time was running out. He was working on these skulls in the same years he painted his last views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain a few miles from that same studio.