Description
Still Life with Plaster Cast – a painting within a painting
This still life is one of Cézanne’s most unusual canvases: a plaster cast of a cupid stands at the centre of the scene, apples and an onion pile up around it and – in the background – other canvases lean against the wall. The work is held by the Courtauld Gallery in London. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this intricate subject into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A scene that does not add up
If you try to follow the edges of the table you find that they do not meet; the floor rises, and the canvases in the background are painted so that it is unclear where the painted picture ends and the room begins. Cézanne did not hide these contradictions – the scene is deliberately assembled from several viewpoints at once.
The cast he kept in the studio
The plaster cast of a cupid was part of Cézanne’s studio equipment and appears in several of his still lifes and drawings. The statue let him set a white, smooth, artificial form beside irregular, coloured fruit in the same scene – two entirely different substances under one light.
What you see on the canvas
At the front stands a plate with apples and an onion, the white statue occupies the middle, and to the right and above, leaning canvases and a bluish drape are ranged. The original is painted in oil on canvas and by the collection’s record measures about 70 × 57 cm; it was made in the mid-1890s.
From a synthetic-fibre works to a gallery
This still life too is part of the collection assembled by Samuel Courtauld, owner of a British synthetic-fibre works. Through the 1920s he bought French modern painting with private money at a time when British public collections still had no ear for it, and in 1932 he gave the collection to the institute of art history that bears his name. Because of that decision London is today one of the few places outside France where Cézanne’s late works can be seen gathered in one place.
Whiteness and fruit on one wall
The plaster cast and the fruit are two entirely different substances under the same light – a difference only a hand-laid stroke catches and no print holds. Available in ten sizes and to your own measurements. The bright, cool scale does well against a white wall. Look at the frame in our 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 an Open Drawer.
- Subject: Still Life with Plaster Cast, Paul Cézanne, c. 1895, Courtauld Gallery, London
- 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 canvases leaning against the wall behind are painted so that the border between painting and room dissolves
