The Plate of Apples

Paul Cezanne · c. 1877

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

45.8 × 54.7 cm (18 1/8 × 21 1/2 in.); Framed: 71.8 × 82.6 × 10.2 cm (28 1/4 × 32 1/2 × 4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

Cézanne's "The Plate of Apples" is a quiet study in tension — a handful of fruit arranged simply on a cloth, yet painted with such sustained intensity that it reads less like still life and more like a personal statement. By the late 1870s, Cézanne had broken decisively from Impressionism's preoccupation with fleeting light and atmosphere, and was working toward something far more structural. He built form through layered planes of color rather than outline, and his brushstrokes follow the contour of each apple as though mapping its volume from several angles simultaneously. The result is still life treated as architecture — solid, weighty, and quietly monumental. Cézanne reportedly said he wanted to "astonish Paris with an apple," a remark that captures both his ambition and his lifelong devotion to the simplest of subjects. He returned to apples across hundreds of works, treating them as the ideal vehicle for exploring mass, space, and pictorial structure. Our hand-painted oil reproduction honors that devotion, replicating Cézanne's characteristic color planes and deliberate mark-making on canvas so that the original's structural gravity — and its understated warmth — carry through to your wall.