Cezanne: Painting and Dining

A highlight of my recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York was an exhibit called "Madame Cezanne" that included all of his paintings and sketches of his wife. Several of Cezanne's wonderful still-lifes and landscapes are also in the Museum of Modern Art. So I've been thinking about Cezanne in a number of ways, including a fascination with his influence on the cubists.

Always, I am fascinated by connections between food and art, so I searched for additional artist-cookbook combinations that seemed to reflect a scholarly approach. (Sometimes one finds cookbooks that are only very tenuously based on a subject -- let's not talk about them!) I found a very nice one about Cezanne.

Cezanne loved to paint fruit, but he needed durable subjects like apples
(not peaches) because he took such a long time to complete his work.
Sometimes he even used artificial flowers.
These things I learned from my new cookbook:

The main text of the book is a fairly standard biography, but the illustrations are very
expressive, and the recipes are appealing.

Provencal recipes maybe really reflect Cezanne's taste or actual foods he's known to have eaten.
Potatoes cooked in olive oil was a documented Cezanne favorite.
Inspired by this, I made potatoes in olive oil for dinner a couple of nights ago.
And I might try this duck recipe some time.

Illustrations include both photos of Cezanne's environment and reproductions of his art.

From the book: I liked this self-portrait.

Cezanne's studio, preserved in a museum now made from his Provencal home.