How Much Is Still Life with Apples and Oranges Worth?

Apples and Oranges epitomizes Cézanne’s late still-life practice—tilted planes, unorthodox perspective, complex drapery, and a tightly orchestrated arrangement of fruit and vessels. The Musée d’Orsay identifies it as the most important still life of the late 1890s, and it is among the most reproduced images in Cézanne scholarship and teaching. The painting’s synthesis of observation and structure is pivotal to the development of modernism, directly informing Cubist experiments by Picasso and Braque. This deep art-historical centrality elevates it from a strong example to a canonical one, ensuring competition from top collectors and institutions in any hypothetical sale and supporting a nine-figure valuation premium.

Large, late Cézanne still lifes of this ambition (74 x 93 cm) are exceptionally scarce in private hands; many of the finest are long embedded in museum collections. Apples and Oranges has been in France’s national collections since 1911 and is legally inalienable, effectively removing it from market circulation. That structural scarcity forces buyers to compete intensely for any broadly comparable work, and it justifies extrapolating value above routine auction outcomes for smaller or less complex still lifes. In trophy markets, rarity of type—here, a definitive late still life with complex drapery and multiple viewpoints—carries a significant scarcity premium and compresses price elasticity at the top end.

The painting’s provenance is exemplary: early ownership by critic Gustave Geffroy, acquisition by top dealer Bernheim-Jeune, then by the legendary collector Isaac de Camondo, whose 1911 bequest to the Louvre (now Musée d’Orsay) cemented its institutional stature. This chain provides bulletproof documentation, long exhibition and publication history, and virtually eliminates provenance-related risk. While public ownership precludes sale, the same status amplifies the painting’s scholarly profile and brand recognition, which would translate into intense trophy-level demand if hypothetically offered. Such ‘A’ provenance often differentiates masterpieces within an artist’s oeuvre and supports pricing at or above the artist’s public auction records.

At 74 x 93 cm, the work is markedly larger than most Cézanne still lifes, and its ambitious construction—sweeping cloth, stacked planes, multiple vessels, and abundant fruit—displays the artist at full command. This complexity is not mere embellishment; it demonstrates the structural logic and spatial experimentation that define Cézanne’s late period. Museums and top private collectors prize this combination of size, bravura handling, and compositional sophistication. Quality at this level is a powerful price driver and explains why superficially similar subjects of smaller scale or simpler design trade far below. In a trophy context, this configuration pushes values decisively into the nine-figure range.

Public benchmarks anchor the estimate: $137.79m for La montagne Sainte-Victoire (2022), $60.5m for Rideau, cruchon et compotier (1999), and $38.94m for a smaller late still life in 2023. A widely reported private-sale apex of >$250m for The Card Players evidences capacity for higher absolute demand. While landscapes and The Card Players series occupy unique positions, a canonical late still life of this scale and recognition could reasonably trade around the auction record or higher, especially under competitive conditions. These data justify bracketing the estimate around the public record while allowing for a scarcity and iconography premium for an example of this caliber.