Paul Cezanne - The Three Skull Tile

The Three Skulls (Trois crânes), painted around 1898 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. Three human skulls are arranged closely together like the fruit in his still lifes, their rounded forms emerging from a dark and compressed setting. Cézanne studies their weight, hollows and curved surfaces through restrained colour and emphatic modelling rather than theatrical symbolism. The motif naturally evokes the vanitas tradition and its reminder of mortality, but it also gave him a severe new set of forms to analyze. During his later years he returned repeatedly to skulls in paintings, watercolors and drawings, sometimes arranging them with the same compositional logic he used for apples. The unusually long, low canvas intensifies the close alignment of the three skulls. The work later passed from Ambroise Vollard through Galerie Bignou into the collection of Robert H. Tannahill.