Works by Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne built apples, jugs and the mountain outside Aix-en-Provence, his birthplace, out of small patches of colour, and would make a pear larger than life if the balance of the picture needed it.

His pictures of the 1860s are dark and thickly loaded, after Delacroix and Courbet; some were laid on with a palette knife. Working beside Camille Pissarro at Pontoise and Auvers in the 1870s, he cut his palette down to red, yellow and blue and began to set strokes next to one another. A Modern Olympia, jeered by critics at the first Impressionist show in 1874, answers Manet's Olympia: a servant whips a white sheet off a crouching nude while a man in black, thought to be Cézanne himself, looks on from a sofa.

Landscapes lead among the works below, then still lifes and portraits. He arranged the still lifes in the studio, often with the same jugs, bottles and apples. In The Basket of Apples the basket tips forward on a block, the bottle leans, and the front edge of the table fails to line up on either side of the cloth.

Montagne Sainte-Victoire was a main subject of his later years, in more than 30 oils and 45 watercolours. He rented a hut at the Bibémus quarry, and in the view from the quarry of about 1897 the grey-violet peak rises over blocks of orange stone and young pines. By Mount Sainte-Victoire of about 1904 the sky is made of the same blue and green patches as the trees, and a pine branch reaching in at the top follows the line of the slope.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Musée d'Orsay, Cleveland Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Institute of Chicago.