Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
The Basket of Apples
Paul Cézanne · Post-Impressionism & Neo-Impressionism
- Artist
- Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
- Date
- c. 1893
- Dimensions
- 65 x 80 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, United States
The Basket of Apples is a still life of a tilted wicker basket spilling apples onto a table, with a wine bottle, a plate of biscuits and a crumpled white tablecloth. It shows how Cézanne transformed the humble still life into a laboratory of modern painting.
A closer look
Nothing in the picture is quite straight. The bottle leans, the table’s front edge is broken by the cloth and does not line up on either side, the basket seems to slide forward, and the biscuits are seen both from the side and from above. Cézanne combined several viewpoints in one image to give each object its fullest presence and to balance the composition. These “mistakes” were deliberate, and they opened the way for the Cubists, who took the idea of multiple viewpoints much further.
History of the painting
Like A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, The Basket of Apples came to the Art Institute of Chicago through the Chicago painter and collector Frederic Clay Bartlett, who in 1926 gave a group of masterpieces in memory of his wife, Helen Birch Bartlett. Her collection, assembled with him in Paris in the early 1920s, made the Art Institute one of the first American museums to hold major works by Cézanne, Van Gogh and Seurat.
