Paul Cezanne - The Kitchen Table Placemat

The Kitchen Table / Still Life with Basket (La Table de cuisine / Nature morte au panier), painted between 1888 and 1890 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. The painting gathers apples and pears with a basket, ginger pot, pitcher, sugar pot and white cloth on a crowded kitchen table. Cézanne tilts the table and shifts the viewpoint across the objects, so the arrangement seems unstable while remaining carefully balanced. The rounded fruit and vessels contrast with the angular chair and screen behind them, turning familiar kitchen objects into a tightly constructed composition. Cézanne signed the canvas and later gave the painting to the writer Paul Alexis in 1891-1892. The work was subsequently shown at Cézanne’s major Salon d’Automne retrospective in 1907 and later entered the French national collections through the bequest of Auguste Pellerin in 1929.