About this artwork
Cezanne painted The Basket of Apples around 1893, at his studio in Aix-en-Provence, where he had been working in isolation for most of the previous decade. He was about 54 years old and had been painting still lifes for over twenty years, but the paintings he produced in the 1890s are the ones that changed the course of European painting.
The painting shows a table with a basket of apples, a wine bottle, a plate of biscuits, and a white cloth. The objects are arranged in a composition that is deliberately unstable. The table is tilted forward, so that the apples seem to be sliding toward the viewer. The basket is perched on the edge of the table, its bottom hanging over the void. The bottle leans to the left, its top cut off by the edge of the canvas. The plate of biscuits sits at an angle that defies gravity. Nothing in the painting is where it should be, and everything is painted with the careful attention of a man who has spent hours looking at it.
Cezanne's still lifes are the paintings that Picasso and Braque studied when they were inventing Cubism, in the years between 1907 and 1914. The Basket of Apples was in the collection of Leo and Gertrude Stein in Paris, and Picasso saw it regularly. What Cezanne did in this painting, and what Picasso took from it, was to break the rules of perspective that had governed European painting since the Renaissance. Instead of showing the table from a single viewpoint, Cezanne showed it from several viewpoints simultaneously: the table top is seen from above, the front edge is seen from the front, and the objects are seen from slightly different angles. The result is a painting that does not pretend to be a window onto a real scene. It is a construction, assembled from observation and from the demands of the composition.
Cezanne had been painting in Aix since the late 1880s, after a brief period in Paris. He was respected by a small group of younger painters, including Emile Bernard and Maurice Denis, who visited him in Aix and wrote about his methods. But he was largely unknown to the public, and his work was rarely exhibited. His first one-man exhibition, at the dealer Ambroise Vollard's gallery in 1895, brought him to the attention of the Parisian art world for the first time. By the time of his death in 1906, he was recognized as one of the most important painters of his generation.
Oil on canvas, 65 by 80 centimeters. Cezanne painted with short, directional strokes, building each object in patches of color that describe its form without modeling it in the traditional sense. The apples are painted in individual strokes of red, yellow, and green, with the highlights applied in opaque white. The bottle is painted in vertical strokes of green and gray, with the glass suggested by the transparency of the paint. The cloth is painted in broad, curving strokes of white and blue, with the folds described by the direction of the brushwork.
The horizontal format and warm palette make this print work well in a kitchen, dining room, or any room with food or flowers. The reds, yellows, and greens pair with natural wood, white walls, and rooms with a rustic or traditional character. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the objects room to read. The painting has a quiet, observational quality that suits rooms where people eat or gather.
The painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection in 1926, gifted by Frederic Clay Bartlett, the same donor who gave the museum Van Gogh's Bedroom.
This is a public domain artwork, scanned from the original at the Art Institute of Chicago. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.
