Still Life in Watercolors

In his portraiture and genre painting, Cézanne worked between watercolor
and oil, but rarely did his watercolors serve as sketches toward his oils. One exception
might be Seated Woman (Madame Cézanne) of around 1902-4 (fig. 36), which
relates both to works like Young Italian Woman at a Table in the Getty Museum (fig.
28) and to many of Cezanne's seated portraits of this period—all works that confirm
his interest in the body that sits at and leans upon the still-life table. The watercolor
study—with its reiterated blue contours of that body, its clothes, the chair back
against which it rests, and the table leg under which it bends its knees—relates even
more loosely to those oils, however, than the cupids sketched from several sides after
the fact of the Courtauld picture.
Every now and then Cézanne produced what might be seen as a pencil and
watercolor ébauche of a still-life subject. At the end of his life, Three Skulls (pi. 9), for
example, yielded an oil not only of the same subject but also with the very same composition.
Or perhaps it was the other way around, and the oil yielded the watercolor,
which is to say that though the watercolor looks like a sketch for the oil, they might
be variations of each other in different media rather than preliminary study and final
picture. A bit earlier, however, in the 1888-90 Ginger Jar with Fruit on a Table (fig. 37),
Figure 37
Paul Cézanne
Ginger Jar with Fruit on
a Table, 1888-90
Watercolor and graphite
on paper, 24 x 36 cm
(9 7 /ie x 14 in.)
Private collection
90
CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO