Description
The Basket of Apples – a table that does not line up
The Basket of Apples was the first work by Cézanne to enter the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and it is among his most discussed still lifes. At first glance it is a quiet table: a basket of apples, a bottle, a plate of biscuits. Look for longer and the scene begins to tilt. The edge of the table does not line up on either side of the cloth, the bottle leans, the apples slide downhill. The canvas hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago (Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, inv. 1926.252); the museum dates it to about 1893 and records it at 65 × 80 cm. Our hand-painted painting on canvas brings the motif to you in oil on canvas.
The edge that will not meet
The most conspicuous decision on this canvas is that misalignment. The museum calls it „controlled chaos“: Cézanne did not build the scene from a single viewpoint but painted each part as he saw it at the moment of looking. We see the plate more from above and the table edge from the side – and where the two halves of the edge fail to meet, that is not a slip but the consequence of a way of looking carried right through. It is this „wrong“ perspective that the Cubists later took as their starting point.
The tower of biscuits that never falls
On the right stands a slim tower of finger biscuits, in French langues de chat, cat’s tongues. The museum points to a detail that is easy to miss: the tower stops just short of the edge of the canvas, as though caught at the last moment. The same tension runs through the brushwork. Fruit and the folds of the cloth are built from dense, almost modelling strokes, while the edges of the table and the cloth stay sketch-like, all but open.
A signature that is usually absent
Cézanne rarely signed his work. This canvas is an exception: „P. Cezanne“ appears at the lower left in a red-brown. From that the museum infers the importance the painter attached to this work, or to its first owner. The first known owner was the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had it by November 1895; the canvas reached Chicago in 1926 as the bequest of Frederick Clay Bartlett.
For a dining room or a kitchen this is a generous motif: warm red and yellow apples, a calm white cloth, and enough inner tension that the painting never settles into mere decoration. Fifteen sizes are available, and a measurement of your own if you prefer. The stretcher frame is included, and you can choose a wooden frame for it using our 3D preview app. Among our hand-painted oil reproductions you will find other Cézanne still lifes: Cherries and Peaches, Still Life with a Curtain and Still Life with an Open Drawer.
- Subject: The Basket of Apples, Paul Cézanne, about 1893, Art Institute of Chicago
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: Cézanne rarely signed his work – here the signature is at the lower left
