Nature morte aux pommes

In the last decades of his life Cézanne painted the same handful of objects again and again, the apples, a rum bottle, a green vase, a ginger pot, arranging them on a table in his studio and studying how they sat in space. He is said to have wanted to astonish Paris with an apple. This canvas, from the early 1890s, is one of those experiments. He builds the fruit from small planes of colour, warm reds against cool greens, and tips the tabletop slightly toward the viewer so the apples seem about to roll forward. He would rework an arrangement like this over so many sittings that the real fruit sometimes rotted and had to be replaced.