Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

In the 1880s, Cézanne’s work centered around still lifes. He produced over 170 paintings in this genre, with the same elements but rearranging them in order to arrive at new formal and painterly answers. A wooden table, a tablecloth, fruits, and a ginger jar were all items in his standard repertoire, with the addition here for the first time of a generous bunch of wildflowers — daisies, carnations, and poppies. None of Cézanne’s other still lifes are so rich in decorative detail, yet the space retains its simplicity of character, and the work retains its formal rigor. The opulence of the right-hand side of the image is balanced by the dark background and the cool, white tablecloth. The individual objects are sensually portrayed and relate in a somewhat monolithic manner to each other and to the picture space. They are an expression of Cézanne’s search for the being of things, which in itself comes through particularly in his style of painting. The surrounding space is divided into planes, but each is alive in every detail — permeated, dissolved, and reconstituted. The colours are of an infinite richness and vibrate in the juxtaposition of finely gradated light values and tones. The picture is notable for its cool, harmonious colour chords — green, yellow, and violet or red, white, and blue. Cézanne’s constant rearrangements were made in an attempt to grasp and understand the objects. He consciously chose the diffuse light of the studio in preference to bright daylight in order to emphasize the sheer physicality of the objects. The objects in Cézanne’s still lifes, whether for daily use, artificial, or natural, are detached from their normal function. Cézanne’s still lifes reflect his recognition that there are laws governing the world and the portrayal of its complexity.