The Basket of Apples
Paul Cezanne (French, 1839–1906)c. 1893
View the original$18
Type
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Materials & printing
Archival matte paper, 189 g/m² (10.3 mil), sourced from Japan, printed with multicolor water-based inkjet so every brushstroke stays crisp. Framed prints arrive ready to hang in a .75″ ayous-wood frame with an acrylite front. Sized to standard frames by cropping, never stretching — at most about 3% comes off one edge, which isn’t noticeable on most pieces, and we only offer a size when it stays that small.
Shipping & returns
Made to order and delivered in 5–8 business days (2–4 to print, 3–4 in transit). US shipping only for now. Because each print is made for your order, all sales are final — but if it arrives damaged or defective, send us a photo within 14 days and we’ll replace it free. Full policy.
Why is it this affordable?
A thin, flat margin on every piece — just enough to keep the store running. Most of what you pay is the print itself. We only sell sizes that reproduce at full quality, and we don’t mark up the large sizes the way most shops do.
About this work
In many ways Paul Cezanne was the odd man out among the artists branded as “Impressionists”—those who showed their works outside of France’s state-sponsored Salon exhibitions. Early on, he painted landscapes, the typical Impressionist subject, but his arresting and complex still lifes changed the traditional nature morte (dead nature) genre and continue to puzzle and tantalize today.
At first glance, The Basket of Apples, the first of Cezanne’s works to enter the museum’s collection, appears to be a fruit-laden table setting anchored by a wine bottle. Closer looking reveals shifts in reality conveyed by the misaligned tabletop, tilted bottle, cascading apples, and the precarious tower of cookies known as langues de chat (cat tongues), which magically stop just short of falling out of the picture. Furthering the sense of what has been called the artist’s “controlled chaos” are the shifts in brushwork from the thick strokes used to model fruits within the cloth’s thick sculptural forms to the sketch-like marks used around the edges of both the table and the cloth. Cezanne rarely signed his paintings, so his signature at the bottom left suggests the importance he ascribed to this painting or to its original owner.
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original size
- 65 × 80 cm (25 7/16 × 31 1/2 in.)
Museum record · 4 owners · 14 exhibitions
Provenance
- Ambroise Vollard, Paris by November 1895.
- Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, by July 1907; sold to Paul Cassirer, Berlin in July 1907; sold to Bernheim-Jeune, Paris in November 1908.
- Jos Hessel, Paris by 1913 and until at least 1920.
- Paul Rosenberg, Paris by 1922; sold to Frederick Clay Bartlett, Chicago by 1925; given to the Art Institute, 1926.
Exhibitions
- Paris, Galerie Vollard, Cézanne, November 1895, no cat. Berlin, Paul Cassirer, 1908.
- Paris, Manzi, Joyant & Cie, Exposition d’art moderne, 1912.
- Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Cézanne, December 1-18, 1920 Paris, Paul Rosenberg, Les Maîtres du siècle passé, May 3-June 3, 1922.
- Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition Paul Cézanne (au profit de la caisse du monument Cézanne), March 3-24, 1924, no cat. no. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Modern French Paintings from the Birch-Bartlett Collection, 1925, no cat. no. Boston Art Club, 1925, no cat., Mass., Fogg Art Museum, French Painting of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, March 6-April 6, 1929.
- The Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, 1933.
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Museum of Art, Cézanne, 1934.
- The Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, June 1-November 1, 1934.
- The Art Institute of Chicago, The Bartlett Collection, 1946, no cat. no..
- The Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings: A Loan Exhibition, February 1-March 16, 1952, traveled to New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 4-May 18, 1952.
- Washington, D. C., The Phillips Collection, Cézanne: An Exhibition in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Phillips Collection, February 27-March 28, 1971, traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, April 17-May 16, 1971 and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, June 1-July 3, 1971 (shown only in Chicago).
- New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cézanne to Picasso Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, September 13, 2006-January 7, 2007; Art Institute of Chicago, February 17-May 13, 2007; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, June 18-Spetember 16, 2007.
- Fort Worth, Tex., Kimbell Museum of Art, The Impressionists: Master Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, June 29–November 2, 2008.
- Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Cézanne and the Past: Tradition and Creativity, October 25, 2012-February 17, 2013.
- Art Institute of Chicago, Cezanne, May 15-Se, 2022; London, Tate, Oct. 5, 2022-Mar. 12, 2023.
