C┼╜zanne painted still lifes throughout his life. Despite the apparently innocuous subject matter and the ease with which models could be found, he never regarded a still life as relaxing work. The still lifes have an important place in his work, reflecting the various stages of his search for a personal style. His first still lifes were in the tradition of such masters as Chardin, Courbet and Manet, who owed a debt to the tenebrist tradition of Spanish painting. These were followed, after 1870, by some ambitious works in which he sought to bring his personal themes into focus: simple still lifes arranged in a corner of his studio or in a middle-class home. The essentially static representation of objects in the early works underwent a dramatic change as C┼╜zanne began to represent objects in space. From 1890 C┼╜zanne produced compositions with large numbers of objects, all carefully balanced to create dynamic groups that defy all sense of reality or even probability. Of these works, Still Life with Apples and Oranges, which was painted about 1899, is a masterpiece.
His still lifes have a landscape-like grandeur of scale, in which subject, shape and colour combine and interact to form an
