Description
Curtain, Jug and Fruit Bowl – the Cézanne you cannot visit
Curtain, Jug and Fruit Bowl is one of those Cézanne still lifes that stands up only because the painter willed it so: a heavy patterned curtain at the left, a stoneware jug, a bowl of apples and pears, and a blue patterned cloth falling in folds across the table. The canvas measures roughly 59 × 72 cm and the catalogue dates it to 1893–1894. Today it is in a private collection – the one work on our Cézanne shelf that you cannot go and see in a museum. Our hand-painted painting on canvas brings it to you in oil on canvas.
The curtain that holds the scene together
The curtain is not a backdrop. Cézanne places it so that its vertical at the left balances the weight of the fruit at the right, and its pattern converses with the pattern of the cloth on the table. Take it away in your mind and the scene slides. That is the difference between a still life as an inventory of objects and a still life as a structure: in Cézanne nothing lies there by accident.
Fruit more solid than the vessel
The apples and pears are built from dense, successive planes of colour that give them an almost stony weight – they often read as more tangible than the bowl holding them. It is also why these still lifes survive mechanical reproduction so poorly: the planes the fruit is made of flatten out. Painted by hand they stay brushstrokes you can look at from close up.
Owners who read like a history of collecting
The canvas has passed through remarkable hands. First the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, then the collector Cornelis Hoogendijk in Amsterdam, then Paul Rosenberg; in 1920 Dr Albert C. Barnes bought it, and for thirty years it belonged to the Barnes collection. In 1950 it went to New York to Mr and Mrs John Hay Whitney, and later into private hands, where it remains. The catalogue raisonné also records the 1999 auction – and marks it as cancelled; for that reason we quote no figures for it, since they would be unreliable.
For a room at home this is a quiet canvas but by no means a dull one: blue, brown and greenish tones dominate, and the red apples give the scene its single warm point. It works well above a sideboard or in a dining room where it can be looked at closely. The fifteen formats run from 50 × 41 cm to 180 × 148 cm, and anything between them can be stretched to order. The stretcher frame comes with the canvas; to see it under a wooden frame, use our 3D preview app. Among our art paintings on canvas you will find other Cézanne still lifes: The Basket of Apples, Still Life with Onions and Cherries and Peaches.
- Subject: Curtain, Jug and Fruit Bowl, Paul Cézanne, 1893–1894, private collection
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: for thirty years the canvas belonged to Dr Albert C. Barnes’s collection
