Fruit and Coffeepot

Painted in 1898 and held in the Hermitage, 'Fruit and Coffeepot' is one of Matisse's relatively early still lifes, painted just two years after his arrival in Paris and showing the strong influence of Cézanne, whose work he had encountered directly and who he regarded throughout his life as his most important predecessor. Matisse purchased Cézanne's 'Three Bathers' in 1899 and kept it for decades, a measure of how central Cézanne's example was to his development. The coffeepot as still-life object appears in multiple Cézanne compositions, and Matisse's use of it here suggests a conscious dialogue. By 1898 he had not yet found his own radical colour language — that would come in 1905 — but his close study of how Cézanne organised objects in space through colour planes rather than shadow was already reshaping his pictorial thinking.

The composition owes an evident debt to Cézanne in its tilted table plane, multiple viewpoints, and use of colour to define spatial relationships. Matisse's handling is already confident but retains a Cézannesque richness of surface.