Still Life with Apples

The Still Life with Apples is an 1894 painting by Paul Cezanne. The painting media is oil on canvas, and it measures 65.4 × 81.6 cm (25 3/4 × 32 1/8 in.).

The Still Life Apples painting depicts the green vase, the ginger pot, the rum bottle, and the apples. The artist used these objects in the painting so that he could experiment color, shape, and lighting to make the overall painting attractive.

Paul arranged all the objects in this painting in such a way that everything is locked together.

The artist used a combination of cool and warm colors in the painting to give it a meaning and communicate his themes. He used this technique to demonstrate that still life that was considered as the lowliest genre of painting in those days could be utilized confidently for representing the appearance of space and light.

The artist insisted that painting from nature is not like copying the object, but it’s a way of realizing one’s sensation. Paul consistently drew attention to the quality of the paint he used on the canvas and never aimed at illusion.

In his painting such as the Still Life with Apples, Paul was impressed by optics, and he tried to reduce forms in their natural appearance to their geometric essentials like the cube, cone, and sphere.

He used color layers on these shapes to come up with surfaces in order to outline forms for further emphasis. His long time study of geometry in painting made him become an expert of perspective. Even if most of his work was rejected by the Paris salon, the younger generations come to appreciate his work as he had high artistical skills. His skills are evident in this painting.

In the Still Life with Apples painting, the edges of the apple fruits on the bowl appear to shift and are undefined. The artist broke the rules of perspective here, and the right corner of the table was painted titled forward and it not even aligned to the left side of the painting.

The artists also left some areas of the canvas bare and other such as the drape of the table cloth seemed as they were left unfinished. The Still Life with Apples paintings can be termed as an imitation of life as it depicts the exploration of seeing and the important aspect of painting.

The Still Life with Apples painting could not have been complete without the use of unique background that the artist used. The background color is in harmony with the most objects in the painting.

The use of such background makes all the items on the painting to be visible. The artist wanted the viewer to appreciate the use of color and the effect of light and space on a painting. The artist made the painting successful by carefully putting all the features of the painting in a manner that each item is in harmony with each other and one object does not take the entire composition of the painting.