Still Life with Commode

By the late 1880s Cézanne had mostly left Paris behind. He was back in Aix, in the south, working slowly and largely alone while the Impressionists he'd once shown with carried on without him. A quiet corner like this one, a chest of drawers, a cloth, a few pieces of fruit, was where he did his hardest thinking. Look at how the front of the commode seems to lean and the tabletop tips toward you, as if you're seeing the room from two places at once. The art historian Meyer Schapiro compared the heaped white cloth to a small mountain. Cézanne painted a wider version of this same corner, now in Munich; here he cropped in close.