dexxxaa's Gallery

Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses. 1890 Oil on Canvas. 73 cm. x 92.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cézanne rarely painted flowers as they were apt to wilt before his deliberations were complete, but he did depict apples aplenty, here convincingly modeled in the third dimension but enclosed in taut circular outlines. The flowers of the Chinese primrose are also circular, as is the right (to us) side of their enclosing pot — a distortion from the ellipse we would expect. The whole plant in fact looks flat and anything but succulent, yet seems to lean out towards us. The cloth and apples are ambiguous in the third dimension: receding comfortably into the distance in the left corner of the table, but being spilled vertiginously along the table edge near us. The painting is becoming angular, even formulaic, but is preserved from the abstract by the colors of the apples and their modeling.

http://www.oil-painting-techniques.com/analysis-paul-cezanne.html