Nature morte à la bouilloire (Still life with kettle)

This is early Cézanne, painted toward the end of the 1860s, when he was in his late twenties and nothing was going his way. The Salon jury in Paris rejected him year after year, and he answered by laying paint on thick with a palette knife in dark, blunt slabs. Here that method is turned on the plainest of subjects, a kettle, some crockery, a knife, onions and fruit on a table. There is no charm being offered. A few years later, working outside Paris alongside the older painter Camille Pissarro, Cézanne would lighten his colours and calm his touch. But the thing he cared about most is already here, the weight and placement of ordinary objects, which he would spend the rest of his life rearranging on tabletops like this one.