The Buffet

The Buffet of 1877 is a more ambitious still-life arrangement than Cézanne's typical tabletop compositions from this period, showing a piece of furniture — a sideboard or buffet — laden with objects. This kind of room-interior still life had a venerable tradition in Dutch and Flemish painting, and Cézanne's engagement with it reflects his sustained study of earlier European painting. By 1877 he had moved away from the palette-knife impasto of his early work toward the directional brushstroke that would define his mature technique, and this transition is visible in The Buffet's handling. The work was included in the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, the last show in which Cézanne participated; he exhibited sixteen works that year to largely dismissive critical response, after which he withdrew from collective exhibition until the 1895 one-man show at Vollard's gallery that revealed his mature achievement to a new generation. The Buffet thus belongs to the brief public phase of his career before his definitive withdrawal to the solitary work in Provence.

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.