Still life with fruit basket

Painted c.1888-1890 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, Still Life with Fruit Basket is among the most compositionally ambitious of Cézanne's mature still lifes — it brings together a wicker basket overflowing with fruit, apples scattered on a white cloth, and a sugar bowl and ginger jar in a complex spatial arrangement that pushes his multiple-viewpoint method to an extreme. The tilted tabletop and the basket's impossible recession have been extensively analysed as early instances of the kind of spatial fragmentation that Cubism would formalise. The Orsay acquired this as a key statement of Cézanne's mature still life practice.

The wicker basket is rendered with intricate woven texture built from short diagonal strokes of warm brown and ochre. The fruit — apples, pears — is individually modelled with patches of red, yellow, and green. The cloth folds are described as a series of soft planes of blue-white and pale grey. The table's recession is deliberately compressed, simultaneously tilting toward the viewer and receding into depth.