The Plate of Apples

A heaping bowl of apples sits on a tilted table, and somehow Paul Cézanne makes this everyday scene feel worthy of serious attention. Painted around 1877, this work came from a period when the artist could not stop returning to fruit as his subject. He once declared he wanted to "astonish Paris with an apple," and pieces like this show his method. Each apple is not smooth or perfectly shaped but assembled from small patches of red, yellow, and green set beside one another, giving the fruit a real sense of weight against the pale dish.

The strange thing about this painting is how little it worries about looking correct. The table appears to tip toward us in a way real tables never do, and the golden back wall carries odd floating blue crosses that seem to belong to no particular object. Cézanne was chasing the underlying shapes and structure of things rather than a faithful copy. The rumpled cloth on the left and the slightly wobbly balance of the whole scene were choices, not mistakes.

Often described as the father of modern art, Cézanne earned that reputation through works exactly like this one. Painters who followed, including Picasso and Matisse, pored over his ideas about form and color, and what they learned fed directly into the daring art of the century ahead.