Still Life with Apples

The green vase, the rum bottle, the ginger pot and the apples — across the last thirty years of his life Paul Cézanne painted the same objects over and over, interested not in the objects themselves but in using them to experiment with shape, colour and lighting. Here everything locks together: the edges of objects run into one another, a black arabesque escapes from the blue cloth to capture an apple at the centre, and the rattan straps of the ginger pot merge with the body of the bottle behind it, the tilted tabletop and tilted bottle holding the whole composition in precarious balance. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.