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Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses

Paul Cézanne, ca. 1890. France.

You are here

Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.

A still life of red and yellow apples on a table with a crumpled white cloth and a pot of pink primroses against a blue-green wall.
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Select it for the full size.

A pot of primroses sits on a table among apples and a rumpled white cloth. The wall behind is a cool blue-green. Cézanne painted apples many times, and he was famous for working very slowly, studying how each fruit held its place in space and how colors pushed and pulled against each other. The apples here are built from small, careful strokes of red, yellow and green, and they look solid and round. The cloth folds and spills over the table. The tabletop doesn’t quite line up with itself, and that slight wrongness is part of what makes the picture feel alive. The painter Claude Monet once owned it.

Look closely

  1. Pick one apple. How many colors is it made of?
  2. Follow the edge of the table. Does it line up?
  3. Look at the white cloth. How many whites can you find?

While you sit

Fruit on a table, studied for a long time. You can study it slowly too.

Your seat in the galleries: a farmhouse walnut bench with a rumpled white linen cloth thrown over it.

About the work

Title
Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses
Artist
Paul Cézanne
Date
ca. 1890
From
France
Medium
Oil on canvas
Size
28 3/4 x 36 3/8 in. (73 x 92.4 cm)
Rights
Public domain
Image
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
Record
The museum's page for this work

The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.

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