Paul Cezanne, 'Curtain, jug and dish of fruit', 1893-4

In 1886, Cezanne inherited and returned to Jas de Bouffan – the manor house in which he grew up – and started repeatedly painting the same set of objects in the isolation of his studio. Staging these items exactingly, Cezanne rendered them from different perspectives to interrogate their formal properties. In some ways, this marks a development on his earlier systematic treatment of landscapes: the faceted brushstrokes and ethos of construction he brought to plein air painting intensifies in the compact, tightly controlled space of the still life. With such an intense and process-driven treatment, the prosaic items attain an enduring splendour.

Here, Cezanne paints a jug and assortment of fruit on a table, draped in white fabric, with a heavy curtain hanging loosely to the left. (The unfinished Still Life with Water Jug [about 1892-3], made around the same time and on long-term loan to the National Gallery, shows similar objects in an alternative arrangement). The flat background of the present work is a mesh of subdued blues, greens, and greys, revealing little about the interior of the scene in which the still life is arranged. Yet in this otherwise coherent arrangement of objects, Cezanne introduces subtle effects of distortion. The reflective spheres of the green apples are modelled with short brushstrokes of gradated tones, investing them with a force of presence; yet their thick black outlines also seem to compress them. Similarly, the simplified, less modulated forms of the oranges seem inconsistent in the picture, appearing flatter than the swollen base of the jug, or the drapery with its contoured folds and ridges. It is as if Cezanne has brought together objects painted at different times from different perspectives. In a development from Impressionism, which valued the empirical study of a fugitive instant, Cezanne’s painting embodies in a single picture – and makes equal – multiple ways and moments of looking.

Cezanne’s equivocal perspectives also make the relationships between the objects seem somewhat unreal. The fruit in the foreground hovers precariously on the folds of the fabric; the dish bearing the stacked pile of fruit looks too high to be feasibly supported by the table; and the jug seems to rest at a slant. This defiance – or at least troubling – of the logic of gravity creates at once a powerful sense of poise and of potential collapse, as if the fruit, despite being locked in a painterly suspension, might tumble down at any minute. This tension, achieved through Cezanne’s experimental planes and perspectives, perhaps speaks to the ‘logic of organised sensations’ that he claimed was crucial to his art. It certainly contributed to the Cubist painter Pablo Picasso’s remark decades later, that Cezanne was ‘the father of us all’.

Along with other still lifes of the early 1890s, Cezanne painted another version of this picture, with a luminous blue-green palette and slightly softer modelling, in the same year.