Paul Cezanne - Still Life with Skull

Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crâne), painted between 1890 and 1893 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. A human skull is placed beside pears and other fruit on a table partly covered by a white cloth with a red stripe. Cézanne treats the skull with the same attention to weight, curvature and colour that he gave apples, bowls and other still-life objects, creating an unsettling equality between the living and the inanimate. The subject introduces the traditional theme of mortality without abandoning his structural experiments in perspective and balance. Skulls would become increasingly important in Cézanne's later still lifes, where their rounded forms offered a stark counterpart to fruit and domestic objects. Cézanne generally avoided skulls and other traditional memento mori props until the final decade of his life, when they began to appear more regularly in his work, perhaps reflecting a growing awareness of mortality.