Still Life with Compotier

Around 1879 Cézanne set a fruit dish, a glass and a few apples on a table and built them like architecture, tilting the plate and letting the forms sit with a weight that ordinary still life never had. The painter Paul Gauguin owned it and loved it beyond reason. He called it the apple of his eye and worked it into the background of one of his own portraits, and he only gave it up, miserably, when he needed the money. Younger painters passed it around almost as a lesson in how to make solid things out of paint. It came eventually to New York, to the Museum of Modern Art.