Still-Life with Apples

Still-Life with Apples from 1901, now in the National Museum in Wrocław, connects Ślewiński directly to the most authoritative Post-Impressionist still-life tradition — that of Paul Cézanne, whose repeated paintings of apples on a cloth or table had become paradigmatic for the entire generation working through and beyond Impressionism. Gauguin himself had absorbed Cézanne's lessons before developing his Synthétist approach, and Ślewiński, working in Gauguin's orbit, encountered Cézanne's influence at one remove. Apples as a still-life subject thus carried a specific weight of art-historical reference for painters of this generation that gave even a modest composition broader implications.

Apples provided Ślewiński with spherical forms whose colour and surface offered both formal challenge and chromatic richness. His Synthétist handling simplifies the apple's rounded form into clear colour areas defined by outline, departing from Cézanne's more constructive, planar approach toward the more decorative surface characteristic of the Post-Aven manner.