Stillleben mit Kommode

Neue Pinakothek

Description

Cézanne painted still lives from the 1860s and created a large and important body of work in this genre during his life. In his case, as well as in that of similar artists, for example Netherlandish painters of the seventeenth and French painters of the eighteenth centuries, as his models, it was not “dead nature” (nature morte), but really the “still/quiet life”, which constitutes the essence of such images.Cézanne’s arrangement of the objects against the dark-brown background of the chest of drawers, i.e. how the plate not only holds the colourful apples, but presents them realistically – enveloped by the drapery of the light cloth - as fruit and, therefore, as testimonials of life, how the vessels vary types of round formats, while also bridging the transition between detail and unrest towards the front and the simpler quiet form of the chest of drawers in the back without losing their importance – attest to the high ability of composition as well as to the fine sense of the diverse nature of things. The relatively hard shapes of the sharp contours that circumscribe them, the moderately opaque application of paint indicate a creation during the mid-1880s. A somewhat smaller version at the Fogg Art Museum may have been an immediate predecessor of the painting in Munich.

Rights Statement Description

CC BY-SA 4.0