Still Life with Apples

By 1890 Cezanne had largely withdrawn from the Paris art world to work near his home town of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, mostly alone. He painted apples over and over, arranging a few pieces of fruit on a table and studying them for weeks, letting them shrivel rather than break up the set-up. This small canvas, just a handful of apples and lemons, comes out of that patient looking. He was not after a pretty arrangement or a lesson about ripeness and decay. He wanted to build the roundness and weight of each fruit out of planes of colour, so that a still life would hold together like architecture. The tabletop tips up toward us more than it really should, pushing the fruit forward into the room.