Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 42
Paul Cezanne
Forest Pat/7, c. 1904-6
Watercolor and graphite
on off-white wove paper,
45-5 x 63 cm
(i7 15 /i6X 24 13 /i6in.)
The Henry and Rose
Pearlman Foundation, Inc.,
1.1988.62.46
Figure 43
Paul Cezanne
Rocks at Bibemus,
c. 1887-90
Watercolor and graphite
on off-white laid paper,
45-9 x 31.8 cm
(i8 1 /s x izVzin.)
The Henry and Rose
Pearlman Foundation, Inc.,
1.1988.62.35.
in the form of patches of loose graphite that weave themselves into the warp and
woof of Cezanne's multicolored overlay of watercolor taches. An excellent example
of this is to be found in the late Forest Path (c. 1904-6; fig. 42), but it is evident much
earlier as well, in studies such as Rocks at Bibemus of around 1887-90 (fig. 43).
In his earliest era of still-life production, the i86os ; Cezanne painted one tiny,
unusual flower piece in watercolor (pi 20), heavily touched with gouache and scribbled
with the same expressionist dabs and flourishes found in the rightmost pear of
Still Life: Sugar Bowl, Pears, and Blue Cup (fig. 5)7 This was a fully developed floral
composition similar to Henri Fantin-Latour's by then signature flower pieces in its
tabletop array of bouquet, fruit, plate, and other dining-room vessels, and at the same
time a kind of baroque caricature of Eugene Delacroix's effusive florals in its swirling
manner. Thus it mapped the epitome of romantic handling onto what might be seen
as its opposite, the quintessence of bourgeois painting. 8 With its dark background
and liberal application of opaque whites, it has the look of a miniature version of
Cezanne's roiling oils of the same period, and it couldn't be more different from his
late work in watercolor in the genre of still life. Like Sugar Bowl, Pears, and Blue Cup,
and in its very rarity, it too is a kind of marker: of Cezanne's strategy of caricaturing
his forebears and adopting an exaggeratedly expressionist facture to signal a kind of
hyper-romanticism—a kind of late-coming sign of the romantic manner; of a concept
123
PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS