Still Life in Watercolors

which was the study and which was the picture, I would choose Still Life with Green
Melon as the former and Still Life with Fruit, Carafe, Sugar Bowl, and Bottle as the
latter, if only because the first, with its repeatedly contoured end-view of the melon,
has fewer objects, put side by side, and is less fully fleshed out than the second; more
tightly packed, overlapped, and watercolor-layered; and more fully contextualized,
with its side view of the watermelon and its table corner giving onto a bit of implied
wall and floor space.
At this point, however, the reader may feel that these distinctions between
etude and tableau have become so slight and so complicated as to no longer matter.
Yet though that is essentially right—they certainly no longer matter much to us—
they were distinctions of the studio that had mattered to Cezanne and out of which
he developed a different order of conception and execution, and a different logic of
pictorial completeness. They haunt his work in the studio, set up as a kind of theater
for exercising and confounding such distinctions. They also help to define the process
and pictoriality of the Getty Still Life with Blue Pot, a consummate demonstration
of the full realization of the possibilities of Cezanne's new order and logic of the
watercolor picture: densely layered, built up the way an oil painting might be; watercolored
from corner to corner (except at the center, where the white linen lies); complexly
composed out of a multitude of objects whose simplicity is turned into a kind
of monumental grandeur; possessing an expanded space that runs from back wall
to the foreground of the table/sofa to the hint of a seam between wall and floor, producing
a kind of geography; and unified by a tapestry that moves behind, around,
and under the composition and offers all the opportunities for layering, peacock coloring,
spatial unfolding, and bravura studio demonstration that in this instance
Cezanne decided to seize.
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clZANNE IN THE STUDIO