The Peppermint Bottle

Cézanne returned to the same studio objects to study their relationships. He later included this very canvas within his Still Life with Plaster Cupid. The bottles, fruit, and cloth thus belonged both to an arrangement of things and to his own continuing work with earlier paintings.

A green bottle stands behind the fruit. Its long vertical differs from the rounded foreground forms.

A clear decanter rises at the center. Colors from neighboring objects pass through the glass while its outline remains recognizable.

Red and yellow fruit line the tabletop. Their colored areas invite comparison of volume through warm and cool transitions.

A white cloth folds around the vessels. Its folds create their own tilted planes within the arrangement.

A patterned blue cloth falls over the edge. Its design and folds connect the objects with the painting's lower area.

The painting appeared in Cézanne's 1907 retrospective and in the Museum of Modern Art's first exhibition in 1929. Its exhibition history belongs to the recognition of still life as a major field of his experiments with form.