The Basket of Apples

A table that cannot exist, a basket tipping forward, a bottle leaning, cookies seen from two sides at once. Cézanne's apples look calm, but they quietly break four centuries of rules about how painters should see.

The story behind the painting

Since the Neoclassical era, still life had largely been dismissed as a trivial subject, less important than religious and history painting, or even landscape and portraiture, apart from a brief flowering in 17th century Northern Europe, especially the Netherlands. For Cézanne this neglect was an opportunity. With few conventions to obey, he treated still life as a blank slate on which to experiment and create meaning. He painted The Basket of Apples around 1893, and through works like it he reinvented the subject for the artists who came after him.

What to look for

The oil on canvas, 65 by 80 cm and signed P. Cézanne at the lower left, shows a table holding a bottle and a basket full of apples. Look at the table: it is tilted and has no right angles, an impossible shape. The basket leans forward and seems held in place only by the bottle and the folds of the tablecloth. The cookies on the plate appear seen from the side and slightly from above at the same time. Heavy brushstrokes give everything a density greater than real life, yet the tilted parts mesh into a balanced whole.

Meaning and intent

Cézanne once described art as a harmony running parallel to nature, and this picture aims for harmony of composition and structure rather than realistic description. Since the Early Renaissance, painters had used a single vantage point to create the illusion of space. Cézanne recognised that human sight is more complex than looking at an object from one frozen moment. He painted sight in motion instead, objects seen from varying viewpoints, deconstructing the image by carefully suggesting different perspectives. The apparent awkwardness is the point: a still life that records how we actually look.

Legacy

The painting shows how Cézanne combined multiple perspectives, vivid colour and analytical brushwork, and it is counted among the works that led to Fauvism and Cubism, which is why he has been called the Father of Modern Art. Its distortions influenced Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In 1957 Braque said that the hard and fast rules of perspective had been a ghastly mistake that took four centuries to redress, and gave Cézanne, then Picasso and himself, the credit. The picture belongs to the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.