Cézanne painted almost 200 still lifes,
focusing on simple household items.
This Plate of Cherries is a marvelous example.
He set up his still lifes with great care.
According to a testimony by an acquaintance of Cézanne,
he sometimes used for instance coins or blocks
to redirect the positions of the objects at the angles he wanted.
By doing so,
Cézanne seemed to create deliberately multiple viewpoints in his still lifes.
The cherries are painted very realistically.
The turn-over in colors give these cherries a spherical shape.
By means of colors,
a three dimensional illusion of an object in a picture can be attained.
This technique is called: modelé.
These cherries of Cézanne show his craftsmanship
and are reminiscent of Dutch 17th century painting.
The epitome of this looseness in painting,
or “lossigheydt”, as it was described by the Dutch painters,
can be seen in Rembrandt’s masterpiece, the “Portrait of Jan Six”,
a mayor of Amsterdam,
in which the paint seems to have massed spontaneously
into the powerful passages of his hands
and the gorgeous fabric of the sitter’s clothes.
In this still life with “Blue Vase” from the 1880s,
Cézanne uses again the unstable axis for a vertical object
to give the still life a dynamic appearance,
an appearance realizing his optical sensations
by seeing the motif over time from different positions.
At first sight the platter behind the vase
seems something like a double yolked egg.
Or do we see two platters sticking out from behind the vase?
Or is it one oval dish?
It is most likely that Cézanne depicted the vase from at least two points of view.
As indicated before, he was a slow working analytical artist,
so, if the fruit or flowers of the still life would wither
before the painting was completed,
they had to be replaced by artificial substitutes.
And over days his physical position
with respect to the still life might have been changed a little.
In his last year Cézanne wrote to his son:
“…the same subject seen from a different angle
offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied
that I think I could occupy myself for months
without changing place
by turning now more to the right,
now more to the left.
The framework of 17th century still life painting
can be recognized in this “Still Life with Fruit Basket”.
In this ostentatious still-life of Dutch painter Willem Claesz. Heda,
the expensive and exotic objects
are, just like the ordinary objects in Cezanne’s painting,
also placed on a flagrantly wrinkled tablecloth.
But Cézanne tries to do more than
producing a photographic representation of the setup.
The tilting of the pottery ….
the disjointment of perspectives,
besides the frontal view
one from left above
and one from right below,
together with the compact composition,
results in a far from static picture.
Moreover,
the right side of the table is not in the same plane as the left side.
The fracture, you expect,
is hidden from view by the tablecloth 
These deviations make the final equilibrium of the picture
seem more evidently an achievement of the artist
rather than an imitation of an already existing stability in nature.
Incontestably, apples were Cézanne’s favorite items for his still lifes.
Here, a sketch and study of one apple on paper…
Two apples…
Two and a half apples, “Deux pommes et demie”...
Three apples...
Four apples...
And five apples...
Six apples...
A couple of paintings with nothing but seven apples….
As said before
It took Cézanne many days to produce a painting,
in particular portraits.
He would tell his sitters:
“Be an apple!”
Eight visible apples...
Just ten apples...
A dish of a dozen visible apples...
Thirteen apples... 
Fourteen apples on a shelf...
Sixteen apples and some biscuits...
Seventeen...
Eighteen...
Nineteen or twenty...
Twenty-three apples and a pot of primroses...
And last … but not least...
thirty apples,
perhaps with one or two pomegranates in between.
Cézanne seemed to have said the famous words:
“I will astonish Paris with an apple”
With the latter in plural, he wouldn’t have been far beside the truth.
Anyway,
he painted apples during his whole lifetime with ardent devotion.
They seem to be his most practiced painter’s motif.
This still life of two apples and a knife
which Cézanne painted in his dark-period-style,
is connected to the work of Gustave Courbet,
the French artist who led the Realist movement
in 19th-century French painting.
He was one of Cezanne’s heroes.
Courbet’s ”Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate” was painted in 1871,
two years before Cézanne’s “Still Life with Two Apples”.
Courbet tries with this still life to evoke the illusion of real objects
existing in the outer world.
Realism in visual arts refers to the general attempt
to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in objective reality,
without embellishment or interpretation
and in accordance with empirical rules.
It can be seen as a forerunner of Impressionism.
In the 1870s Cézanne, under influence of impressionism,
began incorporating brighter colors
and explored new ways of applying paint,
using both brushes and palette knives.
This still life with a stoneware pot dates from 1873.
His tutor at the time, impressionist Camille Pissarro,
painted this “Still Life with Apples and Pitcher”
an exceptional painting, because in his early career
Pissarro painted only two of such still lifes.
These three apples are painted by Édouard Manet,
one of the founders of French impressionism.
His intention was to depict colors and images the way they are seen,
not the way that artists were taught to paint them.
There is no clear shadow, and the apples have no contour.
This basket with apples by Claude Monet,
another pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism,
underscores impressionist principles:
the depiction of changes in light and color
expressing the feeling of the moment,
gleaming spots of light,
color in shadows,
colors straight from the tube
in dots or dashes,
and dissolving firm outlines.
However, Cézanne moved beyond Impressionism
He became more inclined to emphasize structure,
to distort form for expressive effect,
and to use unnatural or arbitrary color.
In his mature period his art was,
what critic Roger Fry called: "Post-Impressionistic".
Like the impressionists,
post-impressionists used vivid colors, distinctive brush strokes,
and real-life subject matter.
They painted with touches and patches of color 
in carefully calculated juxtaposition to one another, 
As in this “Still Life with Apples”
painted by Cézanne’s fellow post-impressionist:
Vincent Van Gogh.
Post-impressionists looked for a new visual logic,
as if to say that art is to find in - as Cézanne put it:
“What our eyes think”.
The intensity of the color, the contours,
the strict organization of the tightly interwoven elements,
together with the deviations from reality,
makes this “Still Life with Apples” from 1893-94
a post-impressionistic work of art.
The tilting of the sugar bowl.
the different viewpoints of the items,
have a dynamic effect on the composition.
An artless viewer might think that the apples tumble off the table
if but one was removed. 
It was not Cézanne’s objective to look with the fixated eye of a still camera,
taking a photo in a split second.
This “Still Life with Turkey Pie”
of Pieter Claesz seems to be painted with such an eye.
Interestingly, to make the static composition more dynamic,
Pieter Claesz - just like Cézanne -
put the fruit dish in a slanting position.
Cézanne tries in his painting
to capture the true experience of human perception
which is based both on space and time,
for we move as we see.
And over the course of days,
he would depict different objects,
or even the same one,
from different points of view.
It was his absorption in the process of painting
that pushed his work toward abstraction.
This approach had enormous implications for 20th century visual culture.
