Musée de l’Orangerie · 1873
Still Life, Pears and Green Apples
Paul Cézanne
Painted in 1873, this is an early instance of a lifelong obsession — Cézanne would return to arrangements of apples and pears for the next three decades, treating them not as a simple genre subject but as a controlled problem: how to build solid form out of colour alone.
Why it matters
Painted in 1873, this is an early instance of a lifelong obsession — Cézanne would return to arrangements of apples and pears for the next three decades, treating them not as a simple genre subject but as a controlled problem: how to build solid form out of colour alone.
Look closer
Notice how each piece of fruit is built from small, distinct patches of colour rather than smooth shading, and how the table's rumpled cloth is treated with the same weight and attention as the fruit itself — nothing in a Cézanne still life is just background.
Cézanne is said to have declared he would "astonish Paris with an apple" — a small, everyday object he treated as seriously as any grand historical subject, and this early still life shows that ambition already fully formed, decades before his more famous, more elaborate apple compositions of the 1890s.
Value context
ELYIO places this work in an indicative editorial context of €7.4–16.6 million.
The museum work is not for sale. This is ELYIO indicative context—not an appraisal, insurance value or offer.