Description
Still Life with Apples – a work built on two pieces of cloth
On the table stand, side by side, a green olive jar with a terracotta foot, a raffia-wrapped bottle, a blue and white ginger pot caught in a net of cord, a small lidded sugar pot with a flowered pattern, and a plate heaped with apples. Under all of it lie two fabrics: a dark blue one with a large pattern at the left, and a white cloth falling away to the right in heavy folds. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s work of 1893 to 1894, which measures 65.4 × 81.6 centimetres in the original and is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles under the inventory number 96.PA.8.
Two cloths, which once gave the work its title
When the canvas was exhibited in Cologne in 1912, the catalogue entered it as Apfelstilleben, Tisch mit blauem und weissem Tuch – apple still life, table with blue and white cloth. The title named neither the pottery nor the bottle but exactly the two things everything else stands on. And so it is: the blue patterned fabric at the lower left gives the work weight and depth, while the white cloth lifts it, breaks into sharp edges and carries the light rightwards to the edge of the canvas. A narrow red stripe runs through the white – the only warm line in the lower half. The catalogue raisonné records the two fabrics separately, and the white one twice, with an entry of its own for the red stripe.
The ginger pot that turns up elsewhere
The vessel with the blue diamond pattern and the net of cord across its belly is not an invented prop but an object the painter puts on the table in other canvases too. The same ginger pot stands in Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears and in Flowers in a Ginger Jar and Fruit. Beside it here are the green olive jar, the wrapped bottle, the sugar pot and the plate – the catalogue lists them one after another among the still-life objects, and every one stands on the canvas where the record puts it.
From Vollard to Los Angeles
The first known owner was the dealer Ambroise Vollard in Paris. On 6 December 1904 Paul Cassirer bought it in Berlin, and around 1910 Baron Ferenc Hatvany in Budapest. After him the canvas returns to Berlin, to Hugo Cassirer, and then to Lotte Cassirer-Fürstenberg; a private collection follows, and in 1996 the Getty acquired it. Hatvany also lent the work out: to Berlin in 1909 and to Cologne in 1912.
Vienna, Budapest, Prague – and some uncertainty
The year 1907 is unusual in the record. The canvas is said to have been at the Galerie Miethke in Vienna in the spring as number 95 or 91, at the Nemzeti Salon in Budapest in May as number 70, and at the Mánes pavilion in Prague in the autumn as number 55 – each time with a reservation, twice with the word “probably” and once with a question mark. Only the shows at Paul Cassirer’s in Berlin in November 1909 as number 32, where Hatvany lent it, and in Cologne in 1912 as number 129 with plate 19, are certain. In 1921 it was in Berlin again, this time under the title Stilleben mit Ingwertopf, lent by Hugo Cassirer.
Into a museum only in 1996
Unlike most of Cézanne’s canvases in public collections, this one reached a museum late: the Getty bought it in 1996 and gave it the inventory number 96.PA.8, in which the first two digits are the year of purchase itself. For nearly a century after it was made it therefore stayed in private hands – dealers, a baron, and two generations of the same Berlin family – before it became something anyone could go and see.
What stood beside the price
In Vollard’s stockbook the canvas carries the number 3439, and beside it a description: peinture à l’huile. sur une table couverte d’un tapis bleu et d’une nappe blanche, plusieurs pots et bouteilles ainsi qu’une assiette couverte de fruits – oil painting; on a table covered with a blue cloth and a white tablecloth, several pots and bottles and a plate heaped with fruit. Next to it stand the measurement 65 × 81 centimetres and the price of 250 francs. Even then, the dealer described the work exactly as we look at it now: the fabrics first, and only then the vessels.
Because the canvas is horizontal and full of quiet, round forms, it sits well above a chest of drawers, a sideboard or a dining table, where it has room across. It is available in fifteen sizes, from 50 × 40 to 180 × 145 centimetres; intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher frame, and the effect of the chosen frame is shown in advance by our 3D application. Among the apple still lifes there is also The Basket of Apples.
- Subject: Still Life with Apples, Paul Cézanne, 1893-1894, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: at the 1912 exhibition the work was entered by its fabrics – table with blue and white cloth – and not by its fruit
