Nature morte, pot à lait et fruits sur une table (Still life with milk pot and fruits on a table)

Nature morte, pot à lait et fruits sur une table (c.1890) at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo is a characteristic mature still life from the year Cézanne's structural method reached its fullest systematic development. The milk pot's cylindrical form provides a different spatial challenge from his ceramic ginger pots and glass decanters — its material is tin rather than ceramic, its proportions simpler, its surface less reflective. The Oslo museum's Cézanne holdings reflect Scandinavia's early engagement with French Post-Impressionism through the collecting activity of Norwegian industrialists and museum directors in the early twentieth century. Edvard Munch, Norway's greatest painter, was aware of Cézanne's work and absorbed aspects of his structural approach; the Oslo collection's Post-Impressionist holdings served the same function for Scandinavian modernism that the Shchukin and Morozov collections served for Russian art.

The milk pot is rendered as a cylindrical volume built through color modulation — light and dark passages that describe its form through hue variation rather than tonal shading. The surrounding fruit is analyzed with equal care. The unstable table surface, tilting slightly forward, is characteristic of his mature spatial approach.