The Basket of Apples

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.