Apples

Painted in 1919, after the First World War had ended, this still life of apples in the Building of the Winterthur Museum of Art belongs to Vallotton's extensive series of fruit and object paintings from his last decade. Apples were among the most charged still life subjects of the Post-Impressionist era, inseparably associated with Cézanne's geometric investigations of the early twentieth century. For Vallotton to paint apples in 1919 was inevitably to paint in the shadow of Cézanne's authority — the question was what a Nabi-derived, psychologically cool Swiss painter could add to the most over-analysed fruit in the history of art. His answer was characteristically personal: the apples are described with a schematic simplicity and a slightly eerie clarity that derives from neither Cézanne's structural analysis nor Impressionist atmospheric shimmer, but from his own distinctive vision of objects as presences rather than occasions for painterly display. The Winterthur connection links this work to the Hahnloser patronage network that was central to his late career.

Oil on canvas with Vallotton's smooth, hard-edged technique applied to the challenge Cézanne had made central: describing spherical fruit on a flat surface in a way that preserves both volumetric truth and painterly integrity. Individual apples are rendered with subtle tonal gradation that creates volume without visible brushwork. The table surface and any drapery are described with the flat, bounded colour planes characteristic of his still life method.