Milk-Jug and Lemon

Cézanne painted this in Melun, a town southeast of Paris, where he rented rooms on the place de la Préfecture from the spring of 1879 into 1880. He had stopped showing with the Impressionists two years earlier and was sending pictures to the official Salon, which turned him down every year. So he worked indoors, on things that could not move: a tin milk can, a lemon, a bowl, a carafe and a white cloth pushed into folds. The canvas is unusually narrow, about 22 centimetres high and twice as wide, so the objects stand in a single row, the way they would on a shelf. Specialists still disagree about the date by several years, partly because Cézanne dated almost nothing and partly because these same kitchen objects turn up in one still life after another.