Still Life with Onions and Bottle, 1895-1900 by Paul Cezanne

In the cool tones and search for rhythmic lines, it is like the Bathers, though less schematically composed. The rounded and flamboyant shapes also articulate the severest, most stable objects , as in the scalloped edge of the table and the outlines of the bottle and glass . It is one of Cézanne's most remarkable compositions , an ingenious development of lines in a musical manner, without drama or climax, and has an amazing delicacy of touch and refined richness of color within a subdued, atmospheric key. Meditative in mood, a result of the most serious meditation, it is a work to ponder and explore.

As a formal theme, the chief element is the onion, a shape more complex than the apple and congenial to Cézanne's later style through its greater flexibility of line and especially its more open, wavy form. We follow its development from left to right in groups open and closed, including the variant lemons, in ever-changing axes, spottings of color, and contacts with neighboring things. Together with the scallops of the table - an ambiguous pairing of concave and convex, of greater span than the similar curves of the onions - the billowing silhouette of the cloth, and the bottle and glass, they form a system of distinct parallel