Description
The Kitchen Table – a painting that rhymes with itself
This is one of Cézanne’s most crowded kitchen scenes: a large wicker basket heaped with pears and apples, a ginger jar on a low stand, a lidded sugar bowl, a white jug with a floral sprig, fruit across the cloth, and behind it all the corner of a table, a ladder-back chair and a painted wall. The canvas measures 65 × 81.5 cm, was painted between 1888 and 1890, and is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (RF 2819). With us a painter’s hand takes it on: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
One curve, said three times
Look at the mouth of the ginger jar. The same arc returns larger in the handle of the basket, and smaller, turned upright, in the handle of the jug. Three times the same shape at three sizes – and because it repeats, the eye travels from one object to the next without knowing why. It is precisely that repetition which holds together a scene that would otherwise scatter, so many things are in it.
The same flower in three places
The same happens with the pattern. The floral decoration on the china jug returns on the round pot, and then once more, far larger, in the painting on the wall behind the table. Cézanne says the same thing three times over: once small, once medium, once filling the room. The still life becomes something nearer to music than to a list of objects.
The kitchen as a building site
The fruit is not laid out in a row, as in most still lifes, but stacked into depth: the basket is propped up and tilted towards the viewer, and behind it the room opens. The scene is therefore not a surface the eye slides across but a space you have to enter. The canvas is reckoned among the richest and most densely populated still lifes in Cézanne’s work – and among the hardest he ever painted.
The Kitchen Table is a warm, yellow-green work full of detail, so it carries large formats and walls that are not bare. It works very well in a kitchen, a dining room, or a room where people linger and have time to look. The fifteen sizes run from 50 × 40 cm to 180 × 142 cm; in-between measurements we stretch to a custom size. How it sits in a frame is shown by our 3D preview application. Among our art paintings on canvas it goes well with The Basket of Apples, Still Life with Onions and The Buffet.
- Subject: The Kitchen Table, Paul Cézanne, 1888-1890, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 2819)
- Technique: hand-painted work, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the same arc returns in the jar, the basket handle and the jug handle
