Still life with Cherub in plaster

By the mid-1890s Paul Cezanne had pulled away from the Impressionists and worked almost alone, arranging objects on a table for weeks at a time. Here a plaster cast of a cupid, a small figure then attributed to the 17th-century sculptor Pierre Puget, stands among apples and onions. Cezanne was not simply copying what sat in front of him. He tips the floor upward, and the apple in the far corner is too large for its distance, as if the scene were seen from several viewpoints at once. Behind the cupid he propped one of his own canvases, and its painted fruit blurs into the real fruit before it, so plaster, canvas and apple quietly change places. That little cupid cast was a studio favourite. It turns up in several of his still lifes and drawings from these years.