Description
Still Life with Soup Tureen – Pissarro’s painting, from Pontoise
A large cream soup tureen with a lid, painted with an orange-red festoon and tassels, a dark bottle standing behind it, a wicker basket heaped with yellow, green and dark red apples, and two apples that have rolled onto the cloth. The cloth is red, printed with small blue flowers. The canvas measures 65 × 83 cm, was made in 1877 and is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (RF 2818). It is painted from scratch, stroke by stroke: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
Two entries that stand side by side
For this canvas the catalogue raisonné records two things. It places the scene at Pontoise, the small town north of Paris where Cézanne worked alongside Camille Pissarro in the 1870s. And as the first owner of the work it names Camille Pissarro himself. How the work came to him the entry does not say, and we are not going to invent it – but it does say that the first home of this work was another painter’s home.
A room with paintings hanging in it
Behind the table the wall is not empty: at the left hangs a framed landscape with a pale building, at the top centre a large light plane of white forms, and at the top right another frame with a green border. What those works are the catalogue does not record, and so we shall not name them either. They do say something else, though: the still life is not set against a neutral wall but in a room where work is done and where art hangs.
In 1937, in Warsaw and Prague
By the time the work belonged to the Louvre it was sent travelling. In February and March 1937 it was at the National Museum in Warsaw, in the exhibition of French painting from Manet to the present day, and in April of the same year in Prague, where it was shown under the title Still Life with Apples. That is why the recorded titles of the work include Czech ones: Zátiší s jablky and Zátiší s polévkovou mísou.
The red cloth, the apples and the white tureen give this work more colour force than most of Cézanne’s still lifes – it is warm, and loud enough to carry a wall on its own. It does well in a dining room, a kitchen or a hospitality space. The fifteen sizes run from 55 × 43 cm to 180 × 140 cm; because the canvas is a wide one, the smallest measurement starts at 55 cm rather than 50. In-between measurements we stretch to custom size, and how it will look framed is shown by our 3D preview application. Among our reproductions of famous paintings it goes well with The Basket of Apples, Poplars, also painted near Pontoise, and Fruit and a Jug on a Table.
- Subject: Still Life with Soup Tureen, Paul Cézanne, 1877, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 2818)
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the catalogue names the painter Camille Pissarro as the first owner
