Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cezanne

In this work, an unidentified woman sits in front of Paul Cézanne’s 1879–80 Still Life with Fruit Dish, now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The painting was part of Paul Gauguin’s own collection, and here he proprietarily signed his name over its white frame. Of the five or six Cézannes that he acquired while still a banker, this was the one he claimed he would never part with, “except in a case of direst necessity.” (He would eventually sell it to pay for medical treatment in Tahiti.) Although the version in this painting is nearly to scale with the original, it is more a translation than a copy, with rhythmical arabesques that are characteristic of Gauguin’s painting style rather than Cézanne’s.