At first glimpse it seems a fairly ordinary still life table arrangement. A plate of peaches on a table; a couple of the riper fruits placed on the table cloth, as if someone had casually picked them from the rest, but was called away before they could be eaten.
It could be a painting full of delicious possibilities, yet there is something terribly heavy about Paul Cezanne's Still Life: Plate Of Peaches.
The dark blue plate is illogically tilted forward, giving a sense that the curiously flattened fruits might tumble to the ground.
And there is no table leg to the left, forcing the shroud-like cloth to hold up the two peaches on its own, impossibly. This apparently 'still' world lacks stability. It is about to fall in on itself, and something is going to get hurt.
The work was painted in 1879, the third consecutive year Cezanne was turned down by the Paris Salon. It shows an important step in his move towards geometric forms.
It also marks a significant time in the history of art when, already destabilised by impressionism, the Western art world was about to be toppled and bruised by abstractionism.
