Dish of Apples

Dish of Apples from around 1876, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to the sustained series of apple still lifes that Cézanne painted across his entire career and that became the most celebrated single motif in Post-Impressionism. The apple occupied a unique place in his imagination: its spherical form offered the fundamental problem of how to render a curved surface in three dimensions using flat colored marks, while its everyday familiarity removed the distractions of novelty or rarity. Chardin had used the apple as a testing ground in the eighteenth century, and Cézanne's engagement with the tradition was deliberate and informed. His Impressionist contemporaries had little interest in the subject — still life was for them a minor genre or a relaxation from landscape — but Cézanne elevated it to the primary vehicle of his formal investigations. The Metropolitan's collection of Cézannes, built through the bequests of major American collectors in the early twentieth century, includes several apple compositions from across his career that together document the evolution of his approach to this single persistent motif.

The shallow dish creates a concave form that gathers the apples into a cluster — the dish's rim a circular element that groups the individual fruits into a collective arrangement. Cézanne's early technique here is somewhat freer and less structured than his mature method, with more visible Impressionist influence.