Still Life with Statuette

The little plaster figure at the centre is a cupid Cézanne kept in his studio, a cast then thought to be after the 17th-century sculptor Pierre Puget. He set it among apples and onions and a folded cloth, and then did something a photograph never could: he let the tabletop tilt up toward us and let the sizes slip, so a painted apple on a canvas at the back reads almost as large as the real fruit in front. By the mid-1890s Cézanne was working largely apart from the Paris art world, in his 50s, turning the ordinary still life into a study of how solid things sit in space. The cast of the cupid recurs in several of his paintings and drawings from these years.