[Vwoolf] Cezanne's apples?

Pat Laurence pat.laurence at gmail.com
Mon Mar 24 21:43:26 EDT 2014


As Diane Gillespie notes there are 7 apples in Cezanne's "Still Life with
Apples" (labelled this way in the Fitzwilliam Museum) and referred to by
Woolf as "Six Apples." It's interesting to read the response of Vanessa and
Virginia to the purchase of this painting by Keynes who later donated it to
the Fitzwilliam. The purchase reverberated through the house of
artists: Vanessa
Bell raved: "the Cezanne is really amazing and it's more exciting to have
it in the house. Its so extraordinarily solid and alive" (Shone 175).
Virginia Woolf ruminated,

what can the 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. There's their relationship
to each other, their color, their solidity. To Roger and Nessa, moreover,
it was a far more intricate question than this. It was a question of pure
paint or mixed; if pure which colour: emerald or viridian; and then the
laying on of the paint; and the time he'd spent, and how he'd altered it,
and why, and when he'd painted it--We carried it into the next room, and
Lord! How it showed up the pictures there, as if you put a real stone among
sham ones. (*Diary* April 13, 1918)
Pat Laurence
City University of New York


On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 1:37 PM, Lorena Russell <lrussell at unca.edu> wrote:

> Dear Woolfians,
>
> I'm preparing a brief undergraduate lecture on modernism, and am trying to
> track down a Cezanne painting that Woolf mentions in her April 1918 diary
> entry. In that entry (I believe Vol. I p. 40--I don't have the source here),
> she recalls an afternoon with Roger Frye and talks about a Cezanne still
> life. From what I can tell, this would be the "Still Life with Apples," at
> the Fitzwilliam although the footnote references one called simple
> "Apples." The Fitzwilliam painting has 8 apples and Woolf references 6 in
> her journal. I realize this may just be an inaccuracy in her account, and I
> know it's a minor detail, but I wondered if anyone on this list might know
> what Cezanne painting she is referencing in that diary reference.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Lorena
>
>
>
>
>
> =======================================
>
> Lorena Russell, Ph.D.
>
> Director of UNC Asheville's QEP, the Inquiry ARC
>
> Associate Professor, Dept. Literature & Language
>
> CPO #2130, Karpen Hall
>
> University of North Carolina
>
> One University Heights
>
> Asheville, NC 28804
>
> 828-251-6594 | lrussell at unca.edu
>
> ========================================
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Vwoolf mailing list
> Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
> https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20140324/ffb9744b/attachment.html>


More information about the Vwoolf mailing list