Nature morte à la théière

This is very late Cézanne, painted at his studio outside Aix-en-Provence in the last few years before he died in 1906. He worked slowly, building the fruit, the cloth and the plain brown teapot out of small planed patches of colour, less interested in the objects themselves than in how solid form sits in space. The wooden table he arranged them on still stands in that studio today. The picture reached Wales by an unlikely route. In 1920 Gwendoline Davies, heiress to a Welsh coal and railway fortune, bought it in Paris for £2,000 and later left it, with the rest of her modern French pictures, to the national museum in Cardiff, where such paintings were still a novelty in Britain.