Our world is built around the 5 senses. However, the most dominant sense is our eyes. We see with our eyes, we imagine with our eyes and we express emotions with our eyes. Using this, we will view a painting by Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples. It’s made from Oil on Canvas, created in 1895, located in the Art Institute of Chicago, with the dimensions of 65 cm x 80 cm. Paul Cézanne’s motto when painting himself or advising his students was “that all of nature can be explained by the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone" (The Women Behind the Cover). You can also extract the same motto from another one of Cézanne’s paintings named The Still Life With Spanish Melon, which follows the same “geometric shapes that Basket of Apples had” (Determinism and Humanism in Modern Medicine). Through the analysis of this painting, it shall be broken down piece-by-piece in order to find the expressions of: subject matter; formal elements; and principles of design, medium, and style.
What is depicted within this canvas is a basket of apples spilt upon a white blanket laid over a table, with a black bottle of wine in the center and a plate of biscuits on the right side in the rear. Digging a little deeper, we can see that there is a life, which is not visible to the naked eye. Each apple seems to display its own soul, through a great expressive feeling. There is a sense of mystery in the section of apples that are split over the blanket, where each one is slightly hidden as the white blanket is perfectly folded over them. The shadows somehow manage to bring them to life.
He blends colours to create variety and establish a difference. Nevertheless, he expands the color palette, which creates a wide range of colour, and provides: hues, contemporary colors, primary colors, and secondary colors within his painting. As Cézanne adds shades and tones, it allows for dimension to exist within the artwork. Here you can see that the Basket of Apples was “the first time I began to appreciate...
