What inspired Mary Cassatt’s portraits of mothers? Why did Jackson Pollock paint on the floor? Eureka investigates the origins of artists’ most famous works and techniques, unpacking how great art ideas happen.

Two of the greatest 19th-century French luminaries, the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and the writer Émile Zola, went to high school together.

Brushing up against the rigid hierarchy of the prestigious College Bourbon in Aix, the two naturally gravitated towards one another. Zola was a bit of an overly sensitive poetry nerd, Cézanne a not-so-gentle giant with a peasant’s directness and a temper to boot. The future painter protected the budding writer from bullies, and in return the latter gave the artist a gift that, in retrospect, illuminates a thread that ran through his entire career.

Paul Cezanne, Apples and Oranges (1839-1906). Photo: DeAgostini/Getty Images/Paris, Musée D’Orsay Art Gallery.

“Zola didn’t give a damn about anything,” Cézanne later told, Joachim Gasquet, author of Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations (1921). “He dreamed. He was stubbornly unsociable—a melancholy young beggar. You know, the kind that kids detest. For no reason at all they ostracized him. And indeed that was the way our friendship started. The whole school, big boys and little, gave me a thrashing because I paid no attention to their blackballing. I defied them, I went and talked to him just the same. A fine fellow. The next day he brought me a big basket of apples. There you are—Cézanne’s apples! They date back a long time.”

To say that “Cézanne’s apples” were already a cultural icon by the time Gasquet’s book was published would be an understatement. In the late 1990s, France even put the artist and his favored subject on a special series 100 franc notes before the introduction of the euro. The painter is thought to have featured the fruit in no less than 270 of his 1300 known works, many of them still lifes with other foods. One example is his Still Life with Apples and Pears (c. 1891-1892), in which, according to its owner, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he “dispensed with traditional one-point perspective and examined the fruit, plates, and table from various viewpoints—straight on, above, and sideways.”

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Apples and Pears (c. 1891-92). Photo: Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images.

Another still life, The Basket of Apples (c. 1893), similarly demonstrates Cézanne’s lifelong unwillingness to conform to norms and conventions. He rebels not only in perspective, but also in his representation of the subject matter. Expressive brushstrokes and bright colors communicate the painter’s core message clearly: that it’s not the object itself but our perception of it that is worthy of investigating.

“With an apple I want to astonish Paris,” Cézanne is often quoted to have said. And in that, he succeeded. While some accused his work of murdering the noble medium of painting, others praised qualities they saw as forward-thinking.

“Of an ordinary painter’s apple you say, ‘I could take a bite out of it,’” Paul Sérusier, a Post-Impressionist artist, once exclaimed. “Of an apple by Cézanne one says: ‘How beautiful!’”

Édouard Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola (1868). Photo: Imagno/Getty Images.

Cézanne himself thought of beauty as “a harmony running parallel to nature,” rather than a straightforward, lifelike representation of it. He depicted his subjects from multiple angles at once, acknowledging the observer’s relation to them. The historical and literary connotations associated with apples, from the Bible onward, may have made them an appealing subject to Cézanne.

If not for their metatextual significance, Cézanne may well have become fascinated with apples because of their association with Zola from his own youth. According to their biographers, the painter and writer weren’t exceptional students. Their academic shortcomings, however, were more due to a lack of interest than lack of ability, and while they sometimes struggled to pay attention in the classroom, they also took long walks around the countryside, where they observed their surroundings with the utmost interest, both developing their unique talents.