Paul Cézanne · c.1901

Pyramid of Skulls

Posters from $10.82 USD · Canvas from $28.14 USD

Ships anywhere in the USA

Cézanne's stark memento mori — four human skulls stacked into a tetrahedron on a bare table. Private collection.

Up to 10 × 8 in · landscape

Size

Larger sizes are unavailable for this painting because the source scan's resolution wouldn't print at gallery quality.

Format & finish

Archival cotton canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Ready to hang as-is. No external frame.

Scale next to a 5'10" person

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Hand-printed in our studio

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Materials & quality

›Canvas & inks

Giclée-printed on archival cotton canvas with fade-resistant pigment inks, hand-stretched over wooden bars. Gallery-wrapped — ready to hang with no extra frame needed.

›Floater frame

Hand-finished solid wood floater frame in five finishes. The canvas sits inside with a clean shadow gap — the way galleries hang contemporary canvas.

›Posters

Premium archival paper — 200 gsm soft matte or 230 gsm vibrant glossy. Ships flat or rolled, ready for your own frame.

›Faithful to the source

Printed from the highest-resolution museum and archive scans available. Each painting's maximum size is capped at what its source scan can support at gallery quality.

About this painting

The story of Pyramid of Skulls

Four skulls are stacked on a plain table, three below and one on top, and Cézanne paints them the way he painted apples: as solid, rounded volumes catching the light, with no drama and no moral attached. He made it around 1901, in his last years at Aix-en-Provence, when he kept skulls in the studio and returned to them repeatedly. It is in a private collection and rarely travels, which is part of why the image has such a following online. It is not a horror picture. It is a still life that happens to be about the one thing every still life is about.

On a wall, Pyramid of Skulls is quieter than the subject suggests. The palette is bone white and pale ochre against a warm brown ground with cool gray shadows, so it reads as a tonal, almost neutral image from across a room. It suits a study, a library, a home office, a hallway, or a bedroom with a taste for the austere, and it works with masculine, academic, dark-wood, and minimalist interiors. Our source image supports the Mini at 10 × 8 in, which makes this a close-viewing print: above a desk, on a bookshelf, or in a grouping of small still lifes and portraits where the brushwork can be read up close.

Cézanne's The Basket of Apples is the same eye on a happier table, and The Card Players shows the same stillness in human form. Van Gogh's Skull with a Burning Cigarette is the other famous painted skull, with a joke in it. More from Paul Cézanne.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the canvas, with the unpainted patches and raw ground Cézanne left showing kept intact.

About the artist

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation, influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century and formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th-century Cubism.

All Paul Cézanne prints →

Biography adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Frequently asked

Pyramid of Skulls— questions & answers

›What does Cézanne's Pyramid of Skulls mean?

Painted around 1901, late in Cézanne's life, it stacks four human skulls into a tetrahedron on a bare table — his starkest memento mori, a meditation on mortality rendered with the same structural rigour as his still lifes of fruit.

›Can I buy a Pyramid of Skulls canvas print in the US?

Yes — Chromora prints Pyramid of Skulls on museum-quality archival cotton canvas, hand-finished in our studio and shipped anywhere in the USA. A single print over $100 USD ships free.

›Where is the original Pyramid of Skulls?

The original is held in a private collection.

Pairs well with