Still Life with Apples and Oranges

Still Life with Apples and Oranges, 1895, another side of Cezanne comes into fullest play. This still life is of an imperial sumptuousness. We feel throughout the work the painter’s joy in the luxuriance and profusion of colorful things, unconstrained by his meditative habit. The old stabilizing (and detaching) construction – the rectangular framework of the table and the clear plane of the wall – has disappeared. Instead, the space as a whole is draped and richly broken; the difference between depth and surface, the vertical plane and the horizontal, is veiled. Everything comes forward; yet there is also a palpable depth, as in the succession of fruit at the left. We are reminded of the space of the quarry and the mountain in the picture of Mont Sainte-Victoire.