Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses

Around 1890 there was almost nowhere in Paris to go and look at a Cezanne. He had stopped exhibiting with the Impressionists years earlier and was working mostly in Provence, so the people who knew the paintings were other painters. In March 1894 one of them, Paul-Cesar Helleu, gave this canvas to Monet, and it went to Giverny among the dozen or so Cezannes Monet kept there. The subject is a strange thing to arrive in that house. Monet spent his last 30 years building a garden, and Cezanne hardly ever painted flowers, because he worked so slowly that cut blooms wilted while he was still looking at them. Only three of his still lifes contain a living plant, and the primroses here are one of them. The picture left Giverny in 1927 and was sold in New York, where it has been ever since.