Peach Blossoms
Winslow Homer
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The Story
In many ways Paul Cezanne was the odd man out among the artists branded as “Impressionists”—those who showed their works outside of France’s state-sponsored Salon exhibitions. Early on, he painted landscapes, the typical Impressionist subject, but his arresting and complex still lifes changed the traditional nature morte (dead nature) genre and continue to puzzle and tantalize today.
At first glance, The Basket of Apples, the first of Cezanne’s works to enter the museum’s collection, appears to be a fruit-laden table setting anchored by a wine bottle. Closer looking reveals shifts in reality conveyed by the misaligned tabletop, tilted bottle, cascading apples, and the precarious tower of cookies known as langues de chat (cat tongues), which magically stop just short of falling out of the picture.
The physical object — Oil on canvas, 65 × 80 cm (25 7/16 × 31 1/2 in.); Framed: 88 × 104.2 × 9.6 cm (34 5/8 × 41 × 3 3/4 in.) — carries its own history of handling and restoration. Paul Cezanne's brushwork here moves between exacting description and looser, more suggestive passages, a balance typical of 19th-century American studio practice.
Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. Commissioned images like this one were rarely neutral; every architectural flourish argues for authority.
Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago now holds the work, where conservators and historians continue to revisit its condition and attribution. Each generation of scholarship adds a layer to how Paul Cezanne's output from this period is understood.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
