Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 18
horizons that were not established first in
pencil. Building broad and narrow strips
of color on top of one another, repeating the
horizontal line of the course in small, its
golden color in violet and rose and pale
blue—including, toward the conclusion of
the process, a long patch of pale blue
smudged over the wainscoting band just to
the right of the blue pot (detail 18), and
several horizontal marks beneath it a longer,
subtly wavering line of purple broken off
and briefly begun again at the end—Cezanne
worked from the horizontal patch to the
thin line of color, rather than the other way
around. In other words, he quite literally
blurred the boundary between color tache
and draftsmanly line, laying them side by
side and over one another so that the difference
between one and the other is seen
as a matter of thickness and thinness, translucency
and opacity, the slightest distinction
in emphasis between the faintest of light*
refraction (pigment) and the most basic
graph ism (line).
At the same time he reversed the order
of line and color that the roughing in and
covering over of the objects at the center of
the sheet initially suggest. Much the same
happens, with different colors and different
degrees of complexity, in the horizontal
courses of the bit of tower molding, where
the wall meets the floor in the southeast portion
of the composition's geography—there
the dominant harmony is provided by a somewhat
darker, thicker overlay of rose on ocher
with touches of blue and maroon; in the
border of the tapestry (or is it the sculpted
molding of a chair or so fa?) at the bottom
center, where banding borders on curvilinear
patterning and gold perforated by white
leads into the denser polychromy of the tapestry
(detail 19); and in the red stripe in
the cloth in the western region of the paper,
where opaque red is laid over transparent
red, grows a bit of blue line beneath it, and
is finally touched by a pale mark similar
to the one found next to the blue pot (detail
20). None of these thickened lines, stripes,
and bands has pencil lines beneath it; all have
partial colored lines laid over them.
Between the two strips at the right lies
a region of layered, crosshatched, fringed
112
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO