Still Life with Open Drawer

By the late 1870s Cezanne had shown alongside the Impressionists but was already moving somewhere else. Where they chased fleeting light, he wanted the solid structure underneath it, and a still life let him work slowly at that. The open drawer here is doing real work. It pushes out toward you at an angle and turns the tabletop into a small architecture of planes and edges, with the fruit set down not casually but placed and weighed. He is still catching colour on the apples, yet he builds them as forms that hold their shape. The picture is small, barely larger than a sheet of writing paper, and every apple in it has the weight of something you could pick up.