Apples, Peaches, Pears and Grapes

Apples, Peaches, Pears and Grapes from 1879, at the Hermitage Museum, is an early work in the long development of Cézanne's fruit arrangements, predating his most structurally complex compositions but already demonstrating his systematic approach to rendering different volumes and colors in relation to each other. The variety of fruits — rounded apples, ovoid pears, globular peaches, clustered grapes — gave him multiple different formal problems to solve simultaneously within a single composition. Russian collectors valued Cézanne early; the Shchukin and Morozov collections that formed the Hermitage's Western modern holdings included important Cézannes acquired in the 1890s and early 1900s.

The variety of fruits provides a range of formal problems in a single canvas: the spherical apple, the elongated pear, the textured grape cluster, the rounded peach. Each requires a slightly different application of Cézanne's method of building form through directional color planes.