Apples and biscuits

There is a story Cézanne liked to tell about apples. As a schoolboy in Aix he stood up for a smaller classmate who was being bullied, and the next day that boy, Émile Zola, thanked him with a basket of apples. The two stayed close for decades. Whether or not that memory sits behind paintings like this one, apples became the fruit Cézanne returned to again and again, arranging and rearranging them for their pure round form rather than any story they told. He set this small still life down around 1880, a few biscuits beside the fruit on a bare surface, working slowly at a time when he had largely stepped back from the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris to paint on his own terms.