Pommes et broc sur une table

Pommes et broc sur une table (Apples and Jug on a Table, c.1900), at the Museum collection Am Römerholz, is a quintessential late Cézanne still life—apples and a ceramic vessel arranged on a tablecloth, a subject he had painted in dozens of variations over four decades. By 1900 these arrangements had become a kind of continuous research project in which each new arrangement allowed him to explore a different configuration of the same formal problems: how colour planes model three-dimensional form, how objects create spatial relationships, how the tilted picture plane of his tabletop arrangements creates the distinctive Cézannean space. The Swiss Am Römerholz collection holds this as part of its extraordinary concentration of Cézanne still lifes.

The apples are rendered with Cézanne's fully mature technique—each fruit built from a mosaic of colour touches in related hues that shift from cool to warm to suggest roundness without conventional shading. The jug's ceramic surface receives similar treatment, its form constructed from modulated planes. The table surface is characteristically tilted toward the viewer, creating the spatial ambiguity that would directly inspire Cubism's multiple-viewpoint analysis of objects in space.