Pyramid of Skulls

Painted c.1899 and now in a private collection, Pyramid of Skulls is among the most unusual of Cézanne's still lifes — four skulls stacked in a rough pyramidal arrangement on a white cloth, combining the traditional vanitas genre with his structural investigation of three-dimensional form. The skull, as a smooth, complex three-dimensional object, presented an ideal subject for his method of building volume through colour modulations. He painted skulls at various points in his career, particularly in the late 1890s when he was approaching sixty and acutely conscious of mortality.

The four skulls are built with overlapping planes of pale grey, ochre, blue-white, and warm shadow tones, each cranium individually modelled yet rhyming formally with its neighbours. The pyramidal composition creates a stable geometric armature. The white cloth below is rendered in cool blue and grey passages that ground the composition. Shadows are colour temperatures rather than dark tones.