Description
Still Life with an Open Drawer – a small canvas, a large lesson
This is one of Cézanne’s smaller still lifes and instructive for exactly that reason: on little more than half a metre of canvas all his methods are gathered – the tilted table, fruit as solid spheres, a white dish seen from above, and an open drawer that brings unrest into the scene. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this concentrated subject into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A drawer that ought not to be open
The open drawer beneath the table top is an unusual choice: it takes the calm out of the scene and makes it a moment rather than an arrangement. With it Cézanne made the horizontal slab of the table no longer merely a support but a body with depth.
Fruit that has weight
The apples and oranges are painted not with smooth transitions but with a run of short planes meeting at slightly different angles. That is what gives them the look of weight. Cézanne once said he wanted to astonish Paris with an apple – a sentence quoted in several versions, which we treat as tradition rather than a literal quotation.
What you see on the canvas
On a dark wooden table stands a white bowl of fruit, with a glass and a knife beside it; a green curtain is suggested in the background. The original is painted in oil on canvas, by the collection’s record measures 41 × 33 cm and was made at the end of the 1870s.
A small canvas with a large effect
Even a small format we paint entirely by hand, in oil on canvas – it is not a print. Besides the ten sizes we will paint it to your measurements if you are planning it into a group of paintings on a wall. It is in exactly such a group that this subject works best. Look at the frames in a realistic 3D preview. Among our hand-painted oil reproductions you will find Cézanne’s other still lifes: Cherries and Peaches, Still Life with a Curtain and Still Life with Plaster Cast.
- Subject: Still Life with an Open Drawer, Paul Cézanne, 1877–1879
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: the open drawer turns the table from a support into a body with depth
