Apples, Grapes and a Shell

In February 1904 Bernard went down to Aix-en-Provence and spent a month with Paul Cézanne, who was 65 by then and working well away from the Paris art world. Cézanne wrote to him that April with the sentence everyone now quotes, that nature should be treated by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. A year or so later Bernard was arranging apples, a bunch of grapes and a seashell on a table and painting them on a piece of cardboard, 34 by 42 centimetres, small enough to hold in two hands. Cézanne died in October 1906. Fruit set out on a bare table stayed one of Bernard's regular subjects for the rest of his life, and he had been painting bottles and apples like this since his twenties.