The Abandoned Apple Tree (Le pommier abandonné)

A hybrid figure of desire, The Abandoned Apple Tree precedes My Garden Project by two years, yet it is in the same vein.
The fluid medium of watercolour is conducive to the sculptural richness of a vision where kingdoms and mythologies merge, blurring the boundaries between the Garden of Eden and the Greco-Roman fable. The female form in the Apple Tree, abandoned to its embrace, offers a graphic counterpoint to Daphne Transformed into a Laurel Tree, the sculpture in the round that Bourdelle had modelled seven years earlier. It is also a free but faithful variation on the transformation of the nymph as sung by Ovid in Book I of the Metamorphoses:  “Thin bark closed over her breast, Her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots...” 
But the stylisation of this apple-tree Eve, with her radiant, limpid nudity, is first and foremost the fruit of a lifetime of sculptural research. The round, spherical offering of the apple, which also symbolises the breast, is a graft of Cézanne's art and eroticism, of which Fruit or The Nudity of Fruit (1902–1911) is undoubtedly the masterly culmination. We can already taste the beginnings of this in the Apples (1907), which is both a tribute to the Bathers by the master from Aix (Cézanne) and to Bourdelle's first wife, Stéphanie Van Parys.
“See, you were both flower and fruit in the branches / Your apples turning red made their blossoms blush.” (Antoine Bourdelle, “To My Wife”, Blue Notebook No. 12, December 1905).

Jérôme Godeau