Fruit and a Jug on a Table

Fruit and a Jug on a Table from around 1890, at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, belongs to Cézanne's mature still-life period when his investigations of form, color, and pictorial structure were reaching their most complex and influential expression. The jug introduces a larger, more vertically dominant form into the composition alongside the rounded fruits, allowing Cézanne to orchestrate the relationship between different geometric volumes in space. Boston's collection of Cézanne, assembled through major gifts in the early twentieth century, reflects the American enthusiasm for his work that recognized him as the key predecessor of twentieth-century painting.

The interplay between jug and fruit explores different approaches to volume — the jug's handle and spout breaking the symmetry of its form, the fruits resting against each other in clusters. Cézanne's technique of building form through color planes is fully mature here.