Ink on Fabriano paper
Gustave Courbet, Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate (1871-2)
Room 41, The National Gallery
'Talent is a matter of patience over time. It involves studying everything one wishes to express, long enough and with enough attention to find an aspect of it that no one has seen or spoken of. There is an element of the unexplored in everything, because we are in the habit of using our eyes only with the memory of what people before us have thought about the things which we are looking at. The smallest thing contains a little of what is unknown. Let us find it ... It is in that way that we become original.'
Maupassant quote from Flaubert
Paul Cezanne, Dish of Apples (1878)
MEtropolitan Museum of Art, New York
