Description
Still Life with a Dessert – a borrowed grandeur
The objects on this canvas are gentlemanly: a heavy cut-glass decanter with incised rosettes, a tall glass on a thin stem, a white cloth, and beneath it all a carved and gilded chest of drawers. What lies on them is bread, pears and apples. The canvas measures 59 × 73 cm, was painted in 1877 or 1879, and is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Tyson collection. In our workshop it becomes a hand-painted painting on canvas, in oil, layer upon layer.
Grand furniture, plain food
The still life with cut crystal and gilded furniture is an old genre: this is how banquets were painted in the eighteenth century. Cézanne borrows that apparatus and then paints it without any shine at all. The decanter is dark and solid as stone, the glass is barely more than a few strokes, and the chest dissolves almost into shadow along the lower edge. The grandeur is present as form, not as display – and that is exactly where the canvas contradicts what the genre promised.
The cloth that cuts the scene on a diagonal
The white cloth falls over the edge of the chest in a sharp diagonal that runs almost from the lower left corner across to the right. That cut divides the canvas and at the same time holds together everything resting on it. The fruit is arranged so as to bring the diagonal back into balance: the yellow, red and green pieces climb towards the right, where a knife and a dark red curtain at the margin close the scene.
A painter who bought the painting
The canvas reached Philadelphia through Carroll S. Tyson Jr. (1878-1956), himself a painter and a collector of French modern art; the Tysons lent it as early as the museum’s opening in March 1928, and it later passed to the museum with their collection. At the lower right Cézanne signed in red. The year is not quite certain: the museum itself gives 1877 or 1879 and does not choose between them.
Still Life with a Dessert is a warm canvas – browns, ochre and white with a few red and green accents – and settles well in a dining room or a living room with wooden furniture. The fifteen sizes reach a largest format of 180 × 146 cm; for a measurement in between we stretch it to a custom size. Check how it looks framed in our 3D preview application. Among our art paintings on canvas it sits well beside The Buffet, Still Life with Plaster Cast and Cherries and Peaches.
- Subject: Still Life with a Dessert, Paul Cézanne, 1877 or 1879, Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Technique: hand-painted work, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: plain bread and fruit rest on a carved, gilded chest of drawers
