Pommes et oranges

In 1899 Cézanne set up the same few props in his Paris studio, a patterned jug, some earthenware dishes, a white cloth, and painted them over and over, six still lifes in all. This is one of them. Look at the table and something is quietly off. The top tilts toward you, the fruit seems about to roll into your lap, the cloth piles up in folds that don't quite obey gravity. That's deliberate. Cézanne wasn't copying what a camera would see. He was rebuilding the apples and oranges as solid shapes, reducing them toward the sphere and the cone, letting each viewpoint shift a little. Younger painters in Paris were watching closely. The floral jug in the middle turns up again and again across the series.