向塞尚致敬

In 1900 Cezanne was alive but a near-recluse in Aix, in the south of France, barely known to the public and revered by a small circle of younger painters. Maurice Denis gathered that circle for this group portrait, standing them around an easel in the dealer Ambroise Vollard's shop in Paris. On the easel is a real Cezanne still life of apples and a fruit bowl, a canvas that Gauguin had once owned and refused to sell even when broke. The men around it are the Nabis and their friends, Redon and Serusier, Vuillard and Bonnard with his pipe, Vollard behind the easel, Denis himself, and at the right his wife Marthe. When Denis showed it the following year, the public laughed. The writer Andre Gide bought it, and later gave it to a French national museum.