Cezanne left most of his canvases unsigned. At the lower left of The Basket of Apples his name is there in paint, and the museum that owns it reads that as a measure of what he thought of the picture, or of the man he was giving it to. The table in it could not be built.
The table does not meet itself
Follow the edge of the tabletop. It goes behind the cloth on the left and comes out on the right at a different height, and no amount of straightening will make the two halves one table.
The basket tips forward out of the picture and appears to be held there by the bottle and a fold of linen. The bottle leans. The stack of biscuits — langues de chat, cat's tongues — is drawn from the side and slightly from above at the same time, and stops just short of sliding off the edge.
The apples sit at an angle the basket does not share. The cloth is laid on in thick sculptural strokes while the edges of the table are sketched in and left alone. Nothing here is a mistake and nothing here is fixable.
Painted from more than one place at once
Since the early Renaissance a painting had agreed to a single vantage point, as though the viewer were nailed to a chair. Cezanne did not think that was what seeing is like.
He painted each object from wherever it looked most like itself, then held the impossible result together with colour instead of geometry. He described what he was after as a harmony running parallel to nature.
Georges Braque, looking back in 1957, called the hard rules of perspective a mistake that had taken four centuries to put right, and named Cezanne first, with himself and Picasso after. The still life people point at when they say that is usually this one. It is sixty-five centimetres by eighty, which is not large for an argument that size.
Chicago, 1926
The dealer Ambroise Vollard had it by November 1895, within a couple of years of its being painted, which is early. Cezanne was close to sixty and still barely selling.
Then Berlin. Paul Cassirer had it on 1 June 1904 and sold it to a collector in Lubeck the same day. It came back to Paris, went to Berlin again in 1907, returned in 1908, and sat out the First World War with a Paris dealer.
In the 1920s Frederick Clay Bartlett bought it and gave it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926. It was the first Cezanne the museum had. The same gift brought At the Moulin Rouge into the building.
Cezanne died in 1906 and saw none of that.
A table that could not be built, holding fruit that cannot fall. It will sit flat on yours.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.