Still life with soup terrine

Still Life with Soup Terrine from 1877, at the Musée d'Orsay, depicts the large ceramic vessel used for serving soup — a domestic object of generous scale that dominates the composition more powerfully than Cézanne's smaller apples and jars. The Musée d'Orsay's collection of Cézanne, including this early work, documents the development from his Impressionist-influenced phase toward his independent mature style. The soup terrine was a traditional subject in French still-life painting going back to Chardin, and Cézanne was fully aware of positioning himself within that tradition. The large, rounded form of the terrine gave him a substantial volume to analyze through his emerging method.

The soup terrine's generous scale dominates the composition, its rounded form requiring Cézanne's full attention to the transition between planes of color that describe its curvature. The lid and handles add specific formal complications to the essentially spherical main body.