Still Life with Open Drawer

An open drawer runs along the bottom of Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Open Drawer , but the fruit above it commands the first glance. Apples press together on a shallow plate. Two more sit to the right; a glass stands behind them, while a broad white basin enters from the left. These modest objects nearly fill the narrow surface. Behind them, a dark mirror rises between strips of warm wood. The basin is cropped, the glass partly disappears against the mirror, and the bright apples keep the middle of the picture crowded.

The Musée d’Orsay records this oil on canvas as Nature morte au tiroir ouvert , dated 1877–79 and measuring 32.5 by 41 centimetres. The online catalogue raisonné identifies it as FWN 750. ^{[1] [2]}

The fruit across the middle

The cluster on the plate is compact without being uniform. A green apple at the left pushes against warmer red and orange fruit. The brightest yellow-orange one near the middle almost seems to advance past the rim, while a deeper red apple rises behind. Each has its own pattern of warm and cool paint. The plate’s bluish edge catches these colours and gives the group a narrow, pale base. We can recognise individual apples, but the group also reads as one irregular mass of colour occupying the centre of the canvas.

The two apples to the right are apart from the plate and apart from each other. One is yellow, green and orange, its rounded surface assembled from changing patches; the smaller fruit beside it is more compressed against the dark side of the setting. Moving across the fruit, we go from a crowded group to a pair, and then to the dark furniture beyond.

The basin on the left almost escapes the picture. Its rim is broad and pale, with a cool shadow inside; its lower body is cut by the frame. We cannot stand back and see it as a complete vessel. Instead its curve interrupts the fruit’s smaller circles, giving the left side a much larger scale. The glass behind the plate has an opposite effect. Its body is compact, nearly lost against the dark mirror, but its rim remains legible. Together the basin and glass set two different tests for looking: one object is too large for its allotted space, the other nearly dissolves into the background.

The basin crowds the plate; the plate approaches the front edge; the right-hand fruit occupy what remains of the dark tabletop. Look at the sliver beneath the plate and the dark patch between glass and apple. Each small separation prevents the objects from collapsing into a single band.

A mirror and a drawer

The pale, broken strokes near the lower left and the warmer marks along the drawer edge give the foreground a restless finish. They are far less resolved than the plate or the red apples. Rather than filling out the furniture with equal detail, Cézanne lets its lower boundary fragment. The viewer has to assemble the drawer from a few edges and tonal shifts. What is open becomes clear through relation: bright tabletop above, lip in front, recessed dark behind it.

Pavel Machotka reads the mirror as slanting toward the open drawer, with the bright apples interrupting their spatial connection. He also compares the vessel ovals: the plate’s near edge is flatter than the basin’s or the glass’s. His argument connects these particular distortions with the shallow space around the objects. ^[3]

Brushwork and balance

Up close, the objects are bound by short, directional marks. Green passages on the left apple meet warm red ones; blue-grey touches cool the basin and plate; ochre and brown make the mirror’s wooden frame. The brushwork does not treat fruit, glass, vessels or wood as completely separate painterly languages. Similar strokes occur across unlike materials. This continuity helps the compact scene cohere even where an edge is uncertain.

Colour and value divide the picture into broad zones. The left has the largest pale object, the middle the most concentrated reds, and the right a yellow apple against dark surroundings. Above them, the mirror’s deep green-black sits beside a much lighter wall. These contrasts form an uneven arrangement: there is no symmetrical pair of apples or vessels around a central axis. Yet the wide basin balances the group of fruits, while the mirror’s vertical frame steadies their lateral spread.

At the far right, a black angular shape rises beside the yellow apples. A blue-grey streak cuts through its darkness, while the broad pale wall above it remains open. This small, jagged passage contrasts with the rounded fruit and the basin’s long curve. It also closes the right edge differently from the cropped, light vessel at the left.

A Musée Léon Dierx teaching dossier sets this picture beside Cézanne’s later The Kitchen Table . It calls the drawer composition comparatively centred and compact, whereas the later still life spreads more objects across a larger setting and sets them at more precarious angles. The comparison is useful without turning the earlier work into a mere rehearsal. Here the unsettled space comes from just a few tightly packed objects, a mirror and the furniture’s open front. The later canvas makes its dislocations more expansive; this one makes them intimate. ^[4]

Date, names and the painting’s later life

The current catalogue raisonné dates this canvas 1877–79. It records Lionello Venturi’s earlier 1883–85 date and his later revision to 1879–82. The changing dates concern this one canvas, whose exact year remains unspecified. ^[2]

The former title Still Life with Mirror directs attention upward; Still Life with Open Drawer points down. The apples sit between the two features. ^[2]

The canvas belonged to Cézanne’s son and later to Bernhard Koehler, Paul Rosenberg and Baroness Alix de Rothschild. It appeared in Rosenberg’s 1936 Le Grand Siècle exhibition and the 1995–96 Cézanne exhibition shown in Paris, London and Philadelphia. ^[1]

The catalogue records a Christie’s auction in London in 1976 and another in New York in 1994. At the latter, the painting was bought in: it did not sell. ^[2]

The French state accepted Philippe Meyer’s gift in 2000 with his life interest retained; the Orsay received the painting in 2007. The museum currently lists it as not on display. ^[1]