Pesche, caraffa e figura

Cézanne died in October 1906, and the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1907 gave him a memorial retrospective that changed what his pictures were worth. In November 1908 a Swiss engineer called Sidney Brown bought this late still life from Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who had handled most of Cézanne's output since the 1890s. Brown's money came out of electricity. He was a director of Brown, Boveri and Company in Baden, and he and his wife Jenny had built a villa there in 1901, then added a gallery wing in 1906 for the French paintings they kept bringing home from Paris. That villa is the Museum Langmatt now and the picture never left it. The pale figure at the edge of the table is often read as Cézanne himself, caught in a mirror.