Cezanne's Apple

"With an apple I will astonish Paris" - Paul Cezanne.

Cézanne demonstrates that still life—considered the lowliest genre of its day—could be a vehicle for faithfully representing the appearance of light and space. “Painting from nature is not copying the object,” he wrote, “it is realizing one’s sensations.”

He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects.

The Basket of Apples by Paul Cezanne is an 1893 still-life oil painting, popularly known for its disjointed point of view. The painting has been portrayed as an impartial composition for its unbalanced parts. It consists of a bottle at the center, an inclined basket with green and red-colored apples, a plate with stacked biscuits and a tablecloth with several apples which seem to have rolled from the inclined basket.

The disjointed perspective of the painting can be noted after examining it closely. Although Cezanne never aimed at illusionism in most of his paintings, in the Basket of Apples it seems as if he completed the piece using 2 different points of view. The right and left sides of the table are not in the same plane as if the table had split into two.
This is a technique which Cezanne used to integrate the distinction of viewpoints into an impressionistic still life. With this technique, Cezanne helped in bridging the gap between Cubism and Impressionism.

Mona Lisa's Seven Smiles

In 1911, Argentine con man Eduardo de Valfierno found a way to steal the Mona Lisa six times over at no risk to himself.

First he made private deals with six separate buyers to steal and deliver the priceless painting. Then he hired a professional art restorer to make six fakes, and shipped them in advance to the buyers’ locales (to avoid later trouble with customs).

In August he paid thief to steal the original from the Louvre. 

On August 21, 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia calmly walked out of the Louvre with the painting tucked under his workman's smock. An immigrant carpenter and decorator born 1881 in Dumenza, a small town on Lake Como, Peruggia worked at the museum. Having planned the burglary, he spent Sunday night there, hiding in a storeroom. On Monday morning, the day the museum was closed, he unhooked the painting, took it out of its heavy frame, which he abandoned under a staircase and, unscrewing the knob of a locked door, let himself out of the building.

When news of the theft had spread Valfierno delivered the six fakes to their recipients, exacting a high price for each. Then he quietly disappeared. The flummoxed thief Peruggia was soon caught trying to sell the red-hot original, and it was returned to the museum in 1913.