Flowers and Fruits

Flowers and Fruits of around 1872, now at the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, combines two still-life categories that Cézanne kept largely separate in his mature work. At this early date he was exploring the range of his possibilities within the studio genre, experimenting with different combinations before settling on the more concentrated arrangements of his mature years. The Bührle Collection in Zurich — built by Emil Georg Bührle in the mid-twentieth century from major European dealers — holds one of the finest private collections of French nineteenth-century painting, with exceptional Cézannes, Monets, Renoirs, and Pissarros. This early work, painted at the same moment Cézanne was absorbing Impressionist lessons in the Auvers landscape, shows him applying those lessons to the domestic interior: the light palette, the broken brushwork, the sense of objects observed directly rather than arranged according to academic convention. The combination of flowers and fruits appears infrequently in his mature work, where he tended to pursue each category with exclusive concentration.

Cézanne built form through disciplined, parallel brushstrokes applied in systematic patches, constructing volume and depth without conventional chiaroscuro. His palette is cool and considered — ochres, blue-greens, muted earth tones — while his fractured perspective.