Still-Life with Flowers and Fruit

This magnificent still-life shows C�zanne at his most fulfilled and fulfilling. Here the ginger jar, pears, and flowers, all placed on a turbulent swirl of tablecloth, bespeak a world of both fixity and change, where the ceramic’s immutability stands in dramatic contrast to the passionate, organic vulnerability of the fruit and the frail, short-lived flags of waving flowers. Like Matisse, C�zanne returned to the most abundant, extravagant Dutch and Flemish Baroque still-lifes as a point of departure for his own.