Paul Cézanne was a loner by temperament. He spent most of his life in his native Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, but his intermittent contact with the Impressionist circle (he participated in two of the group’s exhibitions) was crucial to his development, prompting him to lighten his palette and transform his deliberately crude early style into a manner that is both rugged and elegant.

The Plate of Apples shows Cézanne assimilating lessons he had learned from Camille Pissarro in 1873–74, when the two men painted together in Auvers and Pontoise, but the work retains something of the crusty intransigence of Cézanne’s previous efforts. Brusque strokes of saturated reds, yellows, and greens form the apples; the artist used a palette knife to apply much of the color and to incise contours around the fruits. The blue crosses on the wallpaper seem like talismans hovering in a mustard-yellow sky, generating a subdued aura of mystery. The whole has a rough-hewn quality; we sense that such formal resolution as it possesses was not easily achieved.

Cézanne had begun to place what he termed the "little sensation"—or focused, momentary perception—at the center of his practice, but in an idiosyncratic way. Manipulating perspective, he fashioned fractured compositions that reconcile the eye’s mobility with pictorial solidity. This approach, evident in the tilt of the tabletop, its indeterminate spatial relationship to the wall, and the "squaring" of its left edge with that of the canvas, sets Cézanne’s work apart from that of the Impressionists.