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Artist or Maker: Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

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Description: Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
Compotier et assiette de biscuits
oil on canvas
20¾ x 24 3/8 in. (52.7 x 61.9 cm.)
Painted circa 1877

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Provenance: Victor Vignon, Paris.
Ambroise Vollard, Paris (acquired from the above, 26 June 1898).
Alexandre Rosenberg, Paris (acquired from the above, 16 December 1898). Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, Paris.
Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York.
Edwin C. Vogel, New York.
Sam Salz, New York.
Acquavella Galleries, New York (acquired from the above, 1971).
George S. Livanos, St. Moritz (acquired from the above, 1971).
Acquavella Galleries, New York.
Acquired by the present owner, circa 1988.

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Exhibited: London, Alex. Reid & Lefevre Gallery, Renoir, Cézanne and Contemporaries , June 1934, no. 4 (illustrated).
Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, Exposition Cézanne , 1936, no. 34 (illustrated, pl. 34).
Paris, Palais National des Arts, Chefs-d'oeuvre de l'art français , 1937, no. 248.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Honderd Jaar Fransche Kunst , July-September 1938, no. 17.
New York, Wildenstein & Co., Inc., Six Masters of Post-Impressionism , April-May 1948, no. 1 (illustrated).
The Art Institute of Chicago and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cézanne , February-May 1952, no. 26 (illustrated, p. 31).
New York, Wildenstein & Co., Inc., Cézanne , November-December 1959, no. 14 (illustrated).
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Summer Loan Exhibition , 1959, no. 18.
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paintings from Private Collections (Summer Loan Exhibition) , 1961, no. 20.
Paris, Grand Palais and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Origins of Impressionism 1859-1869 , April 1994-January 1995, no. 48 (illustrated).
Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais; London, Tate Gallery and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cézanne , September 1995-August 1996, p. 172, no. 48 (illustrated in color, p. 173).
Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection and Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Impressionist Still Life , September 2001-June 2002, no. 46.

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Notes: Cézanne's still-lifes have long been recognized as one of the artist's greatest achievements. In a seminal study of Cézanne's oeuvre , Roger Fry declared, "Cézanne is distinguished among artists of the highest rank by the fact that he devoted so large a part of his time to this class of picture, that he achieved in still-life the expression of the most exalted feelings and the deepest intuitions of his nature. Rembrandt alone, and that only in the rarest examples, can be compared to him in this respect" (in Cézanne: A Study of His Development , Chicago, 1927, p. 37). As the basis for his still-life compositions, Cézanne typically selected simple fruits and rustic tablewares, humble props that belie the enormous complexity and inventiveness of these works. He was particularly drawn to apples, once telling his friend Joachim Gasquet, "With an apple, I want to astonish Paris" (quoted in Cézanne , exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995, p. 383). By all accounts, Cézanne was successful. In 1895, the influential critic Thadée Natanson dubbed him "the painter of apples"; exactly a century later, Henri Loyrette wrote, "The apples of Cézanne, like his Bathers and Mont Sainte-Victoires, have come to function as a kind of iconographic moniker comparable to Fantin-Latour's bouquets and Degas's dancers" ( ibid. , p. 174). Meyer Shapiro has explained:

"Not only in the importance of still-life in general for Cézanne's art, but also in his persistent choice of apples, we sense a personal trait. If he achieved a momentary calm through these carefully considered, slowly ripened paintings, it was not in order to prepare for a higher effort. These are major works, often of the same complexity and grandeur as his most impressive landscapes and figure compositions" (in "The Apples of Cézanne," Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers , New York, 1978, p. 15).

Compotier et assiette de biscuits is one of several still-lifes of fruit and sweets that Cézanne painted in 1877-1879 (figs. 1-2; Rewald, nos. 327, 329, 337-338). In each of these canvases, Cézanne altered the exact arrangement of the various still-life elements in order to establish new chromatic and spatial relationships. John Rewald has written, "Cézanne showed a superb inventiveness when, using more or less the same objects, he assembled several series of still-lifes in which each of these objects plays a completely different role. Without repeating the arrangements, he managed, quite to the contrary, to achieve a new balance and a new harmony of colors by shifting the familiar objects and regrouping them in an astonishing variety of compositions" (in Cézanne: A Biography , New York, 1986, p. 181). In the present version, the artist has positioned a compotier of apples and a plate of neatly stacked ladyfingers on a simple wooden storage chest. The same chest appears in at least ten other still-lifes from the latter half of the 1870s, sometimes with a piece of flowered cloth used to enliven the front surface (figs. 1, 6). In the present painting, the flowered material is omitted in favor of a plain white tablecloth arranged in rich, animated folds. The red and yellow apples nestle in a bed of dark green foliage, which sets off the white of the tablecloth and the fruit bowl. A green bottle in the lower left foreground serves as a repoussoir device, and the background features a yellow-green wallpaper with a pattern of open lozenges and blue cross-shaped motifs. The painting is distinguished by a rich texture and subtle chromatic nuances; as Loyrette has commented:

"[The picture] features an early version of the constructive stroke henceforth to be used with increasing rigor; compact, precise, methodical, it judiciously distributes notes of color that resonate with one another across the entire canvas--here impregnating the tumultuous tablecloth (which no longer has the striking unmodulated whiteness of earlier works) with the dominant local color, the blue-violet and yellow of the wallpaper. The latter delineates a geometric constellation, a stylized starry sky, against which stand out the fruity dome of a compotier and a ziggurat of biscuits. These are situated on a large piece of material--restless, turbulent--that agitates the whole composition. This work was to serve as a prototype for many still lifes yet to come: fruit and dishes would be caught up in roiling folds in later canvases, and unsettled tables and chairs would wreak havoc even with their backgrounds" (in exh. cat., op. cit. , Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995, p. 172).

The wallpaper in the background of the present canvas provides an important clue to the painting's date. The same wallpaper appears in four other still-lifes, as well as two portraits of Hortense Fiquet, the future Madame Cézanne (fig. 3; R., nos. 322-328). In the portraits, the pale blue diagonals that connect the medallions in the present painting have been omitted, perhaps to prevent the background from competing with the prominent form of the armchair. This distinctive wallpaper has been associated with an apartment at 67, rue de l'Ouest in Paris where Cézanne lived with Hortense and their young son Paul from the end of 1876 until March of 1878 and again in the spring of 1879. The technique of these paintings, with their successive layers of squarish brushstrokes, is consistent with a date in this period. The same precise, accumulated strokes appear in several securely dated paintings from the late 1870s, including an 1877 portrait of Victor Chocquet, the earliest consistent buyer of Cézanne's work and a tireless champion of Impressionism (fig. 4). Moreover, according to John Rewald, the striped dress with a ruffled hem that Hortense wears in one of the portraits (fig. 3) is typical of fashions during this particular period ( op. cit. , pp. 218-219).

There exists another group of five paintings--four still-lifes and a single self-portrait--that feature a very similar wallpaper background, and it has been suggested that they too may have been painted at 67, rue de l'Ouest in 1877-1879 (fig. 5; R., nos. 478-482). In this second series, however, the lozenges are reddish-brown rather than blue, and the overall pattern is much more pronounced. Additionally, the paintings are characterized by a somewhat thinner application of paint and a stronger stress on contours, suggesting a later date. As Rewald has explained, "There is...in [the paintings] with the cross-shaped blue lozenges an evident delight in texture, a kind of almost 'luscious' emphasis on accumulated layers of pigment that ties the background to the focal objects of the pictures. The same does not appear to be the case in the series where the red-brown lozenges are enclosed in the dark diaper pattern. There the background is somewhat more rigid and dry, its grillwork definitely dominates the composition. In other words, the red-brown lozenges show up in works done, it would seem, slightly later than the paintings with the blue lozenges" ( ibid. , pp. 217-218). The darker wallpaper may have decorated either the house in Melun where Cézanne and Hortense lived from April 1879 until April 1880 or an apartment at 32, rue de l'Ouest in Paris that they occupied for two years after that. A third group of canvases with a distinctive wallpaper background--in this case, a bluish-gray with delicate sprays of leaves that appears in fourteen still-lifes and two portraits (fig. 6; R., nos. 356, 417-421, 423-424, 426-427, 430-433, 438, 606)-- was probably painted in one of these two locations as well.

A variety of explanations have been proposed for Cézanne's predilection for apples as a still-life motif. Gasquet recalled that Cézanne's life-long friendship with Emile Zola began when the future novelist brought his slightly older classmate a basket of apples to thank him for providing protection from schoolyard bullies. Apples also have potent erotic symbolism, as both an attribute of Eve and a symbol of Venus. Cézanne explicitly acknowledges this tradition in L'Eternel féminin of 1877 (R., no. ___), which depicts a reclining nude woman being served a plate of golden apples. In the artist's mature still-lifes, however, apples function first and foremost as objects of formal contemplation. Albert Kostenevich has written, "Apples were at the center of Cézanne's attention for a number of reasons. Not only are they beautiful in color, but in comparison with other fruit they are more varied. Above all, Cézanne was attracted to the simplicity and completeness of their form. He was striving to attain first principles, revealing primal forms. At the same time, he preferred to investigate the relationships between color and spatial and material values by using the simplest examples. There was also a practical reason important for Cézanne: apples do not spoil quickly. With his intensive and prolonged work, he had to take this quality into consideration" (in Hidden Treasures Revealed , exh. cat., State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 1995, p. 194). Cézanne's contemporaries also recognized the aesthetic impact of Cézanne's apples; to quote the painter Paul Sérusier, "Of an apple by an ordinary artist, people say, 'I feel like eating it.' Of an apple by Cézanne they say, 'How beautiful!' You would not peel his apple; you would like to copy it" (quoted in ibid. , p. 196).

The earliest recorded owner of the present still-life is Victor Vignon (1847-1909), a minor Impressionist landscape painter. Vignon periodically visited Pissarro at Pontoise and Dr. Gachet at Auvers during the 1870s and may have met Cézanne at this time; he was also acquainted with the writer Paul Alexis, whom Cézanne knew well through Zola. Vignon was a protégé of Count Armand Doria, an important collector of Impressionist painting. Count Doria made his earliest purchase of an Impressionist canvas, La maison du pendu by Cézanne (R., no. 202), in 1874; it was the first painting that Cézanne had ever sold to someone who was not a close friend. Vollard bought the present painting from Vignon in June of 1898 for 500 francs and sold it to Alexandre Rosenberg in December of the same year for nearly four times that much. Just six months later, a snowscape by Cézanne from Count Doria's estate (R., no. 413) was sold at auction to Claude Monet for 6750 francs, the highest price that had ever paid for a work by the artist.

(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Pommes et gâteaux , 1877-1879. Sold, Christie's New York, 1 November 2005, Lot 4. BARCODE 25010299

(fig. 2) Paul Cézanne, Un dessert , 1877-1879. Philadelphia Museum of Art. BARCODE 25010329

(fig. 3) Paul Cézanne, Madame Cézanne à la jupe rayée, circa 1877. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. BARCODE 25010336

(fig. 4) Paul Cézanne, Portrait de Victor Chocquet assis , 1877. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. BARCODE 25010343

(fig. 5) Paul Cézanne, Fruits, serviette, et boîte à lait , 1880-1881. Musée National de l'Orangerie, Paris. BARCODE 25010312

(fig. 6) Paul Cézanne, Pommes et biscuits , 1879-1880. Musée National de l'Orangerie, Paris. BARCODE 25010305