Still Life with Fruit

Marsden Hartley painted still lifes throughout his career, drawing comparisons for his diverse compositions to artists as disparate as William Merritt Chase, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, and Max Weber. The present work, Still Life with Fruit, is perhaps most reminiscent, however, of the canonic still lifes of French Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne, whose work Hartley studied and learned from for much of the 1920s. The dark shadow outlines around the work's forms, the bunched bright white tablecloth flowing over the table's edge, and the varied fruits carefully arranged: all are clues that this painting belongs to a group of works that expresses most clearly Hartley's affection for the work of Cezanne. Gail Scott writes that Hartley "marveled that Cezanne was able to see so much in his native region [of Aix-en-Provence] (a lesson Hartley had yet to learn). Immersed so totally and passionately in his subject -- whether a mountain, a tree, or an apple -- Cezanne was able (as Hartley saw it) to reach a point of detached contemplation where artistic ego vanishes and the object stands for ultimate reality." (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1988, p. 76)