Still Life in Watercolors

of process as direct, unmediated gesture in a fluid, material medium; and of watercolor
as a place to quickly render an effect that might then be worked out more carefully
in oil (though Cezanne did not really begin to produce oil florals until later).
There was nothing particularly new about any of this, except perhaps the overtness
of Cezanne's consciousness of facture, and his deliberate overstatement of the
romantic posture of gestural colorism, in which ideation and execution are one and
the same, rather than the latter following the former in a linear sequence.
That was a foretaste; the real work in still life and watercolor, and the transformation
of Cezanne's understanding of studio process in those domains, was still
to come. There are two still lifes in particular that exemplify the trajectory from
Cezanne's middle to his late method of working between pencil and watercolor in the
studio genre of still life: Three Pears of around 1888-90 (pi. 21) and Still Life with
Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit of 1906 (pi. 22). 9 In the former, the deceptively simple composition
of three fruits on a plate against a patterned background is brought into
being by means of the relatively traditional filling in of pencil outline and shading
by color and gouache. In this watercolor it is safe to say that almost all of the pencil
work is underdrawing, creating the rounded contours of the three pears, the slightly
warped ellipsis of the plate, and the background pattern, and then shading the right
edge of the rightmost pear, the area beneath the pears on the plate, the passage from
the flat to the lip of the plate on the left, and the left edge of the plate. In all of these
places the graphite is left visible, and toward the upper-left part of the composition,
there is a long diagonal patch of pencil hatching to suggest a cast shadow, perhaps:
that patch of hatching is the sort of thing that might come in later watercolors, that
might be laid over pigment and transform itself into a kind of color work, responding
to and weaving itself into the layers of color taches. Here it appears to be painted
over, and to be followed by a wash of light blue above.
In this little tableau Cezanne used a quarter sheet of weightier laid paper and
a dark, blunt, heavily applied pencil, so that the filling in of his lines by color is all
the more evident: we see it in the yellow, green, and orange pigment that fleshes in
the pears, in the black that goes over the design of the blue and black fabric, in the
bits of wash in the bowl of the plate, above it to the left and below it to the right, and
in the final application of strokes of gouache beneath the plate to the left and highlighting
bits of the tapestry just above the pears. The novelty of procedure in this
still-life picture lies in the way Cezanne went over his contour lines repeatedly, and
particularly in the way he left much of the paper bare, not only the framing corners
of the image but its content as well, rendering the plate and the volumes of the pears
through the cream of the paper itself. Those areas of bare paper serve to make the
very simplicity of the still life complex, by folding positive and negative shape into
an intricate, Escher-like pattern of inversion—shape into interstice, volume into
space and ground and vice versa. At the same time they underline the linear process
of working from underdrawing to shading, to filling in with color, reinforcing with
black and finishing off with bits of opaque white to produce a final product that is
solidly there. Already the process by which the image is formed on the paper is left
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PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS