LOCATION
Aix-en-Provence, France
As one of the last works by Cezanne, this was probably painted in his apartment, pictured here, rather than his atelier up the hill, as he was likely too ill too make the climb.
Watercolor and soft graphite on pale buff wove paper
48 x 62.5 cm. (18 7/8 x 24 5/8 in.)
framed: 75.3 x 90 x 3.8 cm (29 5/8 x 35 7/16 x 1 1/2 in.)
L.1988.62.47
Artist’s son, Paul Cézanne (1872–1947), Paris. Baron F., Paris. [Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris]. Aldus Chapin Higgins (1872–1948), Worcester, Mass.; by descent to his widow Mary S. Higgins, Worcester, Mass.; by descent to estate of Mary S. Higgins, sold at auction, Parke-Bernet, New York, 10 Mar. 1971, lot 13; bought at auction by Henry Pearlman; Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, after 1974.
Conservator’s Note
Throughout most of this watercolor, overlapping patches of translucent wash create a third luminous color against the light paper, whereas densely applied patches of color in the bottle create an opaque layer that obscures the paper completely.
Although much of the graphite is an underdrawing beneath the watercolor, an occasional graphite mark crosses over watercolor strokes, indicating that Cézanne returned to the watercolor with graphite. It appears as if he then applied additional strokes of watercolor over some of the graphite, so that a single graphite mark may pass on top of one stroke of watercolor and lie beneath another.
At once ephemeral and monumental, this luminous still life is believed to be one of the final three watercolors made by Cézanne. In comparison with the earlier Three Pears (about 1888–90), in which the boldly outlined fruits project their physicality, the transparent and opaque forms in this work dissolve into a web of vibrating lines and overlapping color patches.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Cézanne is recognized as one of the great innovators of late 19th- and early 20th-century art, whose work has influenced countless modern artists. With an introverted temperament and generally anti-establishment stance, Cézanne forged a new approach to painting that sought not only to reflect nature but also to express his own response to it. Although during his formative years he exhibited with the Impressionists, he ultimately felt at odds with their emphasis on fleeting experience, seeking greater solidity through painterly form and structure.
Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne studied drawing early on, but, fulfilling his father’s wishes, he later enrolled in university to study law. In 1861, however, he left for Paris, where he studied at the Académie Suisse and copied Romantic and Baroque art at the Louvre. Failing to gain entrance to the École des Beaux-Arts, and constantly rejected by the official Salon, Cézanne rebelliously painted in an intense, even violent, manner, with thickly encrusted paint. Finding a mentor in the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, in the 1870s Cézanne lightened his palette and started working directly from the landscape. He was influenced by the solidity of Pissarro’s brushwork and compositional structure, yet, like Paul Gauguin, whom he met in 1880, he sought to express his own personal perceptions and sensations through his views of nature.
By the late 1870s, Cézanne’s paintings showed increasing emphasis on mass and structure, and he developed a system of parallel brushstrokes, known as his “constructive stroke,” that conveyed the volume of both form and space. With mind and eye working in concert, Cézanne built up his pictures slowly and deliberately, often while directly confronting his motif, whether a landscape, still-life, or portrait. In Aix, the prominent form of Mont Sainte-Victoire became one of his dominant motifs from the mid-1880s until the end of his life. Attracted to its enduring geometric form and the changing views offered by different light and angles, Cézanne created more than thirty paintings in oil and watercolor that conveyed his intense examination of the subject’s underlying structures as well as the shifting nature of perception.
Cézanne used the medium of watercolor to experiment with form and structure, creating a wide range of effects through transparent planes of color and strokes of pencil. The exceptional luminosity of watercolor allowed him to play with light as a constructive element, while often using blank passages of paper to heighten the sense of space and form. Cézanne’s watercolors thus had a great influence on his oil paintings, seen particularly in his use of exposed areas of blank canvas as a constitutive element and passages that reveal open compositional structures, as exemplified in Route to Le Tholonet. Many successive generations of artists, from the Cubists and Fauvists to Abstract Expressionists, would be influenced by Cézanne’s experimental legacy.
