The Art World’s Obsession With Apples, Revolutionized by Paul Cézanne
Ella Goodstein | The Science Survey | 14th August 2026
Cezanne revered apples – he made nearly 300 paintings of them. While living in Paris he captured their irregular details but on moving to Provence he rendered them more spherical. Sometimes taking 100 sessions to finish a still life, his apples began to look like “colours enclosed by a line”. One writer suggests his real objective was to represent “presence, not illusion. [His apples] are so weighted with pictorial decision … they seem twice as solid as real fruit”.