Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 19
Detail 20
patches of color, similar to those above the
topmost course, but denser, browner and
rosier in tonality, and darker—a kind of
earthen median between the tapestry's com-
plicated Provencal color patterning and the
faintly brushed surface of the upper zone of
wall (detail 21). At the left limit of that lower
section of wall, where the wall behind the
tapestry seeks to meet the contour of the
tapestry's fall off the table, there is a curiously
negative edge, a halo effect where the
pale overlay of strokes forming the wall stops
just short of the right edge of the tapestry's
expanse of densely figurative, many-hued
marks, forming a line of descent that runs
just parallel to it. The veiled demesne of the
watercolor as a whole is writ large there;
at the same time it is as if Cezanne wanted to
mark the distance of the surface of the wall
from that of the textile, as well as from the
surface of the paper.
And perhaps he may have wanted to
mark in some fashion the turning inside out
of line and color, so that each is seen as an
inversion of the other and the opposite of
itself in its usual incarnation. Thus, the haloing
of the tapestry by a kind of interstice, the
transformation of its edge into an extended
threshold that is made partly of bare paper,
produces an understanding of line, not as a
n 3
PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS