The Basket of Apples

In the still lifes of his late years Paul Cézanne repeatedly unsettled the stable world of the tabletop, and The Basket of Apples belongs to the celebrated group of fruit pieces in which the surface itself seems to tip toward the viewer. Writers on the birth of modern art have long pointed to the picture, habitually citing it beside the Cubist still lifes it anticipates and the distance it marks from the academic tradition. The canvas came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926 with the Helen Birch Bartlett collection, a purchase that gave the museum one of the first great groups of modern French painting in America. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.