Still life, pear and green apples

Still life, pear and green apples of around 1873, at the Musée de l'Orangerie, belongs to the Auvers period when Cézanne was consolidating the lessons Pissarro had given him while beginning to push toward his own systematic approach. The pear and apple combination was a classic French still-life subject with precedents in Chardin, and Cézanne's choice of it at this date was partly a deliberate engagement with the national tradition of which he was consciously a part. The Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris holds this early canvas alongside its famous Monet Water Lilies rooms, creating an unusual juxtaposition of two radically different responses to the problem of nature and painting at the same historical moment. Where Monet was moving toward atmospheric dissolution and the subordination of form to light, Cézanne was insisting on form's permanence — on the apple's irreducible spherical reality beneath its colored surface. The Orangerie's collection documents both directions that French painting took in the decades after Impressionism, and this modest early still life belongs to the founding moment of the Cézannian alternative.

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.