Description
Still Life with Onions – the knife that opens depth
Still Life with Onions is among the most fully resolved of Cézanne’s late still lifes. On a table whose right edge draws back, a dish of onions stands before white drapery, with a quiet grey wall behind; to the left more onions lie scattered across the table in front of a bottle and a glass. The canvas hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (inv. RF 2817), measures 66 × 82 cm, and was made between 1896 and 1898. Our hand-painted painting on canvas brings this quiet motif to you in oil on canvas.
A knife Cézanne inherited
The quietest device on this canvas is the knife laid at a slant across the table edge. It is not an ornament: the diagonal opens depth where the tabletop would otherwise stay flat. Nor is it Cézanne’s invention – he takes it from Chardin, as Manet had taken it before him. Once you have noticed it, you will find it again and again in the still lifes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Four viewpoints in one painting
The museum’s own description breaks the scene down so that the method becomes tangible. The bottle and the front band of the table are seen head-on, the glass from above, the dish foreshortened, the knife at an angle. This is what is called elevated perspective: the painter chooses no single station point but paints each object from the angle that shows it best. The result feels calm and very slightly displaced at the same time – and it was that displacement the Cubists carried forward.
One canvas, four different dates
The dating is an open question on which art history has never settled. Georges Rivière placed it in 1887, Douglas Cooper around 1894, Lawrence Gowing about 1895, Lionello Venturi between 1895 and 1900, and John Rewald in 1896–1898. The current catalogue raisonné follows Rewald, so we give 1896–1898 too – as the best-founded estimate rather than a proven fact.
The canvas came into the collection through the collector Auguste Pellerin, who bequeathed it in 1929 to the French national museums for the Louvre; in 1986 it passed to the Musée d’Orsay. For a room at home this is a quieter motif than Cézanne’s landscapes: brown and violet onions, white cloth and a grey wall make a hushed, almost meditative scene that holds up in the smaller sizes too. Being a chamber-scale motif, it is often ordered small; the range runs from 50 × 40 cm to 180 × 144 cm, and an in-between measurement can be stretched to order. Every canvas ships on its stretcher frame, and our 3D preview app shows how a wooden frame would sit around it. Among our art paintings on canvas you will also find The Basket of Apples, Cherries and Peaches and Still Life with a Curtain.
- Subject: Still Life with Onions, Paul Cézanne, 1896–1898, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the slanted knife is a device Cézanne takes over from Chardin
