The Buffet

A white cloth tumbles across the dark front of a wooden buffet. Fruit rests in its folds; a bottle and a glass stand behind it; a plate of biscuits occupies the right edge. Above this crowded lower surface, two cups, a sugar bowl and a single piece of fruit sit on a narrow shelf. The familiar objects are easy to name, but the painting keeps shifting our attention between them and the furniture that holds them.

A still life built on two levels

The first division to notice is horizontal. A narrow upper shelf almost spans the painting, but the broad lower shelf carries most of its weight. Against the dark brown backing, the upper cups appear pale and comparatively isolated. Below, cloth, fruit, glass, bottle and biscuits form a much denser band. The eye rises to the cups, drops to the fruit, then returns to the shelf edge that divides the two groups. The buffet is an active part of the arrangement: its long dark lines give the scattered objects a framework.

The white cloth resists that framework. It bunches into a crest near the middle, snakes around the fruit and drops over the front at the right. Its lower corner points toward the viewer while the shelf behind it runs sideways. The cloth therefore gives the composition a direction that the furniture alone would lack. A fruit at the front left sits against one of its pale folds; more fruit stretches toward the glass. Small changes of colour and overlap make the group legible without turning it into a neat row.

At the far right, the plate of biscuits projects beyond the main cluster. It looks almost precariously close to the edge, yet its pale oval answers the pale folds farther left. Behind the plate, the buffet's right side turns sharply downward into a dark vertical border. Looking from one end of the painting to the other, one can follow alternating patches of white, orange and brown. The plate pulls that sequence to the very edge, where the painted furniture finally closes it.

Judit Geskó, writing for the Budapest museum, reads the picture as a balance of asymmetry and symmetry. She describes the bottle as a link between the levels and contrasts the apparent weights of porcelain, glass, cloth and biscuits. Her account names a tension between their casual placement and the arrangement that holds them together. ^[1]

The date and the place

The painting has acquired several dates. Venturi’s original catalogue placed it in 1873–77 and his revision around 1877. Cézanne’s son annotated a Vollard photograph with L’Estaque and 1883. Rewald and the current online catalogue favour 1877–79. The son's annotation and scholarly datings differ; the canvas itself carries no date. The work is FWN 746, corresponding to R 338 and V 208. ^[2]

The 1913 sale catalogue, meanwhile, assigned it an approximate date of 1880. ^[3]

The museum places the still life at L’Estaque, near Marseille, and situates it in Cézanne’s lighter work of the 1870s. Geskó connects such paintings with his study of Chardin and Spanish painting. That history gives the buffet context: an ordinary domestic setup becomes an exercise in arrangement. Its construction helps us read it despite the uncertain date. ^[1]

A useful comparison is Cézanne’s Still Life with Jar, Cup, and Apples at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated about 1877. The Met notes that its patterned background and white napkin shape that composition; the Budapest picture sets its objects against a substantial piece of dark furniture. Both canvases ask the eye to move between fruit, vessels and cloth, but their settings produce different rhythms. The Met picture lets pattern occupy the backdrop, whereas The Buffet uses the shelf itself to separate an upper and a lower register. ^[4]

Seen and described in Cézanne’s lifetime

The painting appeared in Ambroise Vollard’s Paris exhibition of 1899 as Buffet avec Fruits et Gateaux . ^[2]

Writing in Le Temps on 16 November 1899, François Thiébault-Sisson discussed Cézanne’s still lifes through examples of a bottle, a tilted cup and a pile of biscuits. Those details closely resemble this canvas, although the review’s discussion is not a secure description of this picture alone. The critic praised the force and colour of individual objects while questioning their perspective. Today the same uncertain alignments can be read as part of the composition’s restless visual order, rather than simply as an error to forgive. ^[5]

Vollard's stockbooks describe the work closely. One entry has fruit on a cloth and biscuits below, with cups and a sugar bowl above; a second records the buffet and apples. These inventories identify the arrangement across changes of owner and title. The two shelves and their contents give a more precise description than Still Life . ^[2]

From a private collection to Budapest

In 1913 the Nemes collection sale in Paris listed the painting as lot 86. Its description located apples and pears in a white napkin beside a bottle and stemmed glass, with biscuits on a plate to the right and cups and a sugar bowl on the shelf above. The sale catalogue dated it around 1880 and recorded earlier displays in Budapest and Düsseldorf. Reading that entry beside the painting is revealing: a commercial description could identify almost every object, yet it could not convey the long dark planes, the abrupt drop of cloth or the way the plate presses against the right edge. ^[3]

The catalogue traces an earlier route from Vollard to Denys Cochin, back to Vollard, then to Marczell de Nemes. ^[2]

A contemporary notice in Kunstchronik says Mór Lipót Herzog acquired the painting at the 1913 sale for 40,000 francs and that the painter Baron Ferenc Hatvany donated it to the museum in 1917. The notice treated the gift as filling a gap in the museum’s modern collection. Its language shows that the gift was understood as more than an addition to an already settled group of French pictures. ^[6]

A second Kunstchronik report that June named The Buffet alongside works by Corot, Delacroix, Manet and Monet in the museum's developing modern French holdings. It described director Elek Petrovics's interest in acquisitions significant to European art history. The painting's new public home belonged to a deliberate programme of collecting, with the gift adding a Cézanne to an emerging group. The two notices mark stages in its transition from private collection to public display. ^[6]

The museum included the picture in its 2012–13 Cézanne and the Past exhibition, which examined the artist's engagement with earlier art. ^[7]

A contemporary review reports that The Buffet had been restored for that exhibition and that its display helped prompt a reorganisation of the museum’s late nineteenth-century galleries. The same canvas that entered as a conspicuous addition to the modern collection became a point around which the museum reconsidered its presentation of that collection. The restoration and new display are specific events in the work's public history, long after the sales and gifts that brought it to Budapest. ^[8]