Throughout his life, the French painter Paul Cézanne returned again and again to the still life. Encompassing small—scale domestic scenes rather than grand public ones, still life was considered the lowliest of genres by the French Royal Academy, the official arbiter of great art in the nineteenth century. Yet in <em>Still Life with Apples</em>, Cézanne proved that this modest genre could be a vehicle for thinking through the Impressionist project of faithfully representing the appearance of light and space. "Painting from nature is not copying the object," he wrote, "it is realizing one's sensations."