Still Life with Apples

Paul Cézanne

Oil on canvas

J. Paul Getty Museum

Still Life with Apples is an oil on canvas painting executed by Paul Cézanne between 1893 and 1894, now held in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The composition arranges apples, ceramic vessels, a bottle, and draped cloth across a tabletop, with Cézanne employing his characteristic layered, analytical brushwork to explore the volume, weight, and spatial relationships of ordinary objects rather than simply reproducing their outward appearance. Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, Cézanne worked largely outside the Parisian mainstream, developing a Post-Impressionist method in which color modulation and multiple viewpoints replace conventional linear perspective. This pictorial rigor — applied with particular intensity to the still life genre — proved foundational to twentieth-century modernism, directly influencing the emergence of Cubism and the work of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse.