Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

In April 1904 Berlin's Nationalgalerie took in this still life while Cézanne was still working in Aix, two and a half years before his death. It came through the dealer Paul Cassirer and was paid for by two local patrons, the banker Robert von Mendelssohn and the businessman Eduard Arnhold, while its director, Hugo von Tschudi, was buying modern French painting against the taste of the imperial court. The museum's own description points to the order inside it: the tip of a yellow pear marks the line that divides the canvas in two, with the ginger jar and its flowers on the right and the cloth heaped up like a mountain on the left, against a deep night blue. After the Second World War the picture was among the gallery's paintings taken to the Soviet Union. It came back in 1958 and hung that November in an East Berlin exhibition titled Treasures of World Culture Saved by the Soviet Union.