Apples FWN 760 1878 19cm x 26.7
“For the love that he put into painting them and that made him sum up all his gifts in them, he is and remains the painter of apples – smooth, round, fresh, weighty bursting apples from which colour flows…with ravishing form. It is he who has given them shining dresses of red and yellow, who has made tiles of reflecting light on their skins, who has encompassed in a loving stroke, their rotundity, and has created from them a delicious, definitive image” - Thadee Natanson describing Cezanne’s Apples in his review of Vollard’s 1st exhibition of Cezanne’s work, in 1895.
Nigh on twenty years before, Cezanne had started painting apples. It is tempting to say that paintings such as this – where Cezanne paints only fruit, with no table, tablecloth or decorative features – were his way of finding out how best to paint them; a bit of trial and error, or to employ the metaphor used by Henri Loyrette of the Museum d’Orsay in his comment in the Tate Cezanne Exhibition of 1996: “in short, …visual exercises in which he practised his tonal scales, carefully gauging the effects produced by the juxtapositions of greens, yellows and reds.”
And yet, not everyone in 1895 was impressed in the same way: , apparently, one member of Persian nobility commented: “this gentleman, Cezanne as you call him, has the mind of a greengrocer!” But, as so often, other artists and avant-garde critics felt that Cezanne was onto something, even if they could not quite find the most flattering explanation: “apples that are brutal, rugged, built up with a trowel, and then abruptly subdued with a thumb”, says the critic, Huysmans. And then Degas was seduced by “the charm of this refined savage”. Degas was a bit miffed after failing to buy Cezanne’s portrait of Victor Chocquet – “ha,” he snarled “one madman’s portrait painted by another madman”. Degas thought his pirouetting dancers far more refined than Cezanne’s static apples! Nonetheless he was willing to pay 200 francs for this little still-life of Apples, and, display it in his own museum, and, baptize it ‘Apples, green, yellow, red’, and finally, retain it till his own demise.
The little painting of ‘Apples, green, yellow and red’ came on to the market after Degas’ demise, in between World War 1 and the Second World War, when the Economist John Maynard Keynes and the Director of the National Gallery in London went to Paris to engage in what we might now call: ‘Quantitive Easing’. JMK hadn’t yet formulated his famous formula relating a country’s capital, to its yield, its investment, and crucially the economic activity of its government, (fiscal stuff, and spending-power): C=Y+I+G. Their clandestine, economically charitable, task was to spend a whole heap of money in France and so enable the UK to expand its Capital Assets, and help the war-ravaged French to obtain some strong Sterling Pounds. The Director of the National Gallery went in disguise, as he presumably thought the French would not understand that their purchase of a whole heap of French Art, at low exchange rates, was purely from an economically mutually advantageous motivation. Strangely enough, the director of the National Gallery refused to buy any Cezanne’s; and so the poor economist was left having to buy his own Cezanne: Apples, green, yellow and red’. The painting thus did not enter the National Gallery collection, but remained part of the Keynes collection and now lives in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Back in Provence in 1878, the Cezanne’s son Paul, now six, had typhoid; Hortence nursed him through-out the first half of the year. It was a hard year for the Cezanne family. Cezanne needed desperately to find extra cash to support his family: he already owed Pere Tanguy in Montmartre the sum of 2175 Francs for paints and canvasses; so he had to borrow the sum of 60 francs, five times through-out the year from his school mate Zola. Fortunately Zola had made it big in Paris with his first book, and could afford to help his struggling artist friend.
I like to think that by the end of the summer of 1878, Paul and Paul junior painted some apples together, thanking Hortense for nursing young Paul back to health, and Zola for the quantitive easing.
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing dear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
Robert Frost
Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself
and silently to grow and to bear fruit.
Rainer Maria Rilke