Still Life in Watercolors

NOTES
1. See Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy: Open-Air
Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991),
esp. 11-12, on this set of distinctions. See also
Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in
the Nineteenth Century (London: Phaidon, 1971).
2. John Rewald (Paul Cezanne: The Watercolors, a
Catalogue Raisonne [Boston: Little, Brown, 1983],
232-33, nos. 571, 572) proposes that the Getty watercolor
is a second, more accomplished version of the
Michigan work, which he understands as a kind of
preliminary working out of the composition, or
ebauche (though he does not use that word). While I
agree that the two watercolors are intimately related,
and that the Getty watercolor is the more satisfying
of the two, I believe them to be variations on a theme,
rather than a sequence of preliminary and final efforts.
3. The medium of watercolor, however, also seems
to have provided Cezanne with a model for painting
more lightly in oil, for allowing the ground to show
through and using its white or cream as a color in
itself. All who write about Cezanne's work in watercolor
suggest its importance to his late work in oil.
4. See Jennifer L. Shaw, "The Figure of Venus:
Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,"
Art History 14 (December 1991): 540-57, on the
nineteenth-century maintenance of the link between
drawing and masculinity versus color and femininity.
Shaw's argument rests in large part on Charles
Blanc's Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris: H.
Renouard, 1876) and its elaboration of the older
association between color and femininity, going back
at least to Roger de Piles in the seventeenth century,
who defined colons as the "difference of painting,"
that which distinguishes painting from the other
visual arts: "le Coloris est non seulement une partie
essentielle de la Peinture; mais encore qu'il est la
difference;... le Dessein soit le genre de la Peinture,
et la Couleur sa difference" (Roger de Piles, Dialogue
sur le colons [Paris: Langlois, 1673], 2 5~ 2 6)- See
Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Couleur eloquente:
Rhetorique et peinture a I'age classique (Paris: Flammarion,
1989); and "Making Up Representation:
The Risks of Femininity," Representations 20 (Fall
1987): 77-87. Coloris is to be distinguished from
couleur, colons means the illusionism and harmonic
system of colors, while couleur simply signifies this
or that pigment or local color.
5. See Richard Shiff, Cezanne and the End of
Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique,
and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), on the
relationship between Impressionism, Symbolism,
and Cezanne. Of course, no artist, Impressionist or
otherwise, ever really records what he sees passively,
as if he were a camera lens. For example, Monet,
who Cezanne said was "just an eye" ("but what an
eye"), worked hard, deliberately, and very complexly
on creating the impression of a passive recording of
the light that entered his retina. On this subject, see
Robert Herbert, "Method and Meaning in Monet,"
Art in America 67, no. 5 (1979): 90-108; and James
Elkins, What Painting Is (New York and London:
Routledge, 1999), 9-39.
6. Which is not to say that they were not collectible
and exhibitable as etudes. See Galassi, Corot
in Italy, 83-129.
7. Cezanne was converted to a lightened palette
and an emphasis upon working sur le motif instead
of from fantasy (which characterized his work of the
i86os) or upon copying the old masters (which he
nonetheless continued to do throughout his life),
through his close association with Camille Pissarro,
particularly his campaign at Pontoise and Auvers
in 1872 and 1873.
8. A prime example of the landscape ebauche,
which corresponds to a finished oil of the same subject
and composition, is the watercolor Mont Sainte-
Victoire with Large Pine of 1886-87, in the Phillips
Collection, Washington, D.C., which is probably a
preliminary version of the oil painting of the same
name in the Courtauld Institute Galleries, dated to
approximately 1887.
9. The nude was a studio tradition, predicated on
the study of the male model—called the academie—
as the basis of history-painting pedagogy and composition
in the academic atelier and, increasingly, on
the study of the female model in the private studio.
The so-called Eternal Feminine may be understood as
a kind of allegory of the studio, looking back to
such precedents as Courbet's Atelier: A Real Allegory
of Seven Years of My Life as a Painter of 1855, which
was also such an allegory.
10. An uncharacteristic earlier study (c. 1885)
of two whole watermelons with their stems still
attached, overlapped and seen from the side, is
clearly an etude; there are no other variations on
this theme, nor are there any oils of this subject.
See Rewald, The Watercolors, 133, no. 200.
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PICTURE AND SKETCH