Nature morte au médaillon de Philippe Solari (Still life with a medaillon of Solari)

Nature morte au médaillon de Philippe Solari, painted around 1872, is remarkable for introducing a specifically personal element into the still-life format. Philippe Solari was a sculptor who had been Cézanne's close friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence, along with Émile Zola; his medallion portrait appears here among the domestic objects of Cézanne's table as a tribute that transforms the genre from formal exercise into something more intimate. Cézanne was working in the Auvers-Pontoise orbit at this date, attending to the lessons Pissarro was giving him about palette and plein-air practice, but the still life provided a private space where his own formal investigations could proceed independently. The inclusion of Solari's sculpted relief within a painted arrangement also raises questions about the relation between sculpture and painting — a conversation about form in three dimensions reproduced in two — that suited Cézanne's philosophical turn of mind. The painting belongs to the Musée d'Orsay's strong Cézanne holdings, which document his development through the 1870s with unusual completeness.

The ceramic relief medallion is rendered with attention to its circular form and bas-relief character, distinct in handling from the rounder volumes of the fruit beside it. The tablecloth provides the characteristic creased, tilted plane that Cézanne used to introduce spatial ambiguity. Colour is built from small, directional strokes that analyse each surface independently.