Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses

Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses was painted around 1890, when Cézanne divided his time between Paris and Jas de Bouffan, the family estate in Aix-en-Provence his father had purchased in 1859 and which remained his primary base until he sold it in 1899. Potted plants were exceptional in Cézanne's practice: he included them in only three oil paintings, preferring subjects that would not wilt under the extended working sessions that were characteristic of his method. The distinctive table with its scalloped apron and bowed legs is identifiable as a prop Cézanne reserved for some of his finest still lifes of the decade, appearing in two other compositions of the same period. Following Cézanne's first solo exhibition at Ambroise Vollard's Paris gallery in November 1895 — which, despite mixed critical reception, established him among a circle of artist-collectors — the painting came into the possession of Claude Monet, an ardent gardener and among the earliest collectors of Cézanne's work. It subsequently entered the collection of the New York lawyer, financier, and art patron Samuel Adolph Lewisohn (1884–1951), a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who assembled one of the major American Post-Impressionist holdings of his generation; on his death in 1951 the painting was bequeathed to the Met. Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence on 19 January 1839, the son of a banker whose inheritance later freed him from financial insecurity; his childhood friendship with Émile Zola, formed at the Collège Bourbon in Aix, shaped his early intellectual formation. He moved to Paris in 1861, was rejected from the École des Beaux-Arts, and trained at the Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro, who became a lasting mentor and encouraged him toward a lighter palette and plein-air observation. He exhibited in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 but developed an increasingly independent analytical approach to form and color, pursuing it in deepening isolation at Aix-en-Provence during the final decades of his life. He died in Aix-en-Provence on 22 October 1906.