Why did Cézanne paint apples that seem to tilt?

Cézanne's apples look slightly wrong on purpose. In his still lifes from the late 1880s he refrained from rendering objects in linear perspective and instead depicted them in the dimensions that made sense to him compositionally: a pear, for example, could be oversized to achieve inner balance. He built his arrangements in the studio, and the aim was not the fruit itself but, as one description has it, the arrangement of the shapes and colours on the surface.

Behind the oddities was a theory about seeing. Cézanne said that painting from nature does not mean copying the object but realizing its "sensations". He explored binocular vision, rendering slightly different yet simultaneous perceptions of the same thing, which gives an experience of depth different from single-point perspective.

That is why the art world looked at him twice. His paintings first met incomprehension and ridicule; Manet called him a mason who paints with a trowel. Later Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne is "the father of us all". He altered conventional approaches to perspective and emphasized the underlying structure of objects, and became the bridge between Impressionism and Cubism.