Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 34
Paul Cézanne
Eternal Feminine, c. 1877
Watercolor, gouache,
and graphite on white
paper, 17.4 x 22.8 cm
(6 7 /s x 9 in.)
Private collection
Figure 35
Paul Cézanne
Eternal Feminine, c. 1877
Oil on canvas, 43.2 x 53 cm
(17 x 20 7 /s in.)
Los Angeles, J. Paul
Getty Museum 87.PA.79
contours of the later pencil and watercolor studies refute their own clarity of line by
repeating, rehearsing, and reinforcing it. (The earlier graphite study is more traditionally
drawn and shaded, its incomplete contours mimicking the incompleteness of the
body of the plaster.) Yet, at the same time, those repeated lines reiterate the studio
process of working in the round and studying a plaster cast from all sides, and with
it the distinction between sketch (watercolor) and finished picture (oil).
Much earlier in his career, Cézanne had produced compositional ébauches in
the old manner, working out a concept on paper before translating it into oil and
finishing it on canvas. Such is the case of the fully worked-out watercolor study for
Eternal Feminine, painted around 1877 (figs. 34, 35). This was done during a period
in which Cézanne was shifting from an earlier emphasis on fantasy pictures to his
focus on the plein air motif, with the intertwined problems of "sensation" and "realization"
that it raised for him. The shift was not then, and never would be, complete,
for Eternal Feminine was part of a larger set of variations on the theme of the nude
done from the imagination rather than the model. This theme, which began with
subjects like the Temptation of Saint Anthony and variations on Manet's Olympia
and Déjeuner sur l'herbe, continued to preoccupy Cézanne until the end of his life, in
his great studio productions, the Large Bathers in the Barnes Foundation, Merion,
Pennsylvania; the National Gallery, London; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
But one thing did change fairly markedly, and that was what had been the development
of a theme in a watercolor ébauche and its translation into a finished oil: in the
realm of an imaginative concept, an allegory in this case, that lent itself to and even
required such development. 9 The bathers, male and female, that Cézanne worked on
throughout his life may have had oil and watercolor variations, but the progress from
one to the other was never clearly linear, nor was the distinction between sketch
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO