Still Life in Watercolors

evident, but that process is methodical and linear, and the relation between start and
finish, line and color that it enacts is clearly sequential.
Not so in the late period. Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit offers a beautiful
demonstration of how much distance Cezanne had traveled within his still-life
and watercolor process. This still life is clearly devoted to showing its own compulsive
process of making—of drawing with the pencil and painting with the watercolor
brush and then drawing and painting and drawing again—thus indexing what
goes on in the studio as well as what goes into it. Never before did the making of three
different glass vessels out of the ingredients of white paper, graphite lines, and watercolor
layers reiterate itself so evidently, showing how the concert of painting and drawing
could mimic the craft of glassblowing, bringing light and dark, transparent and
translucent forms into being, as in this late still life. Never before did any of Cezanne's
still lifes in watercolor put side by side so demonstratively the different degrees of
rendering and the different ratios of watercolor to pencil needed to bring a group of
objects into existence on the surface of a sheet of paper: very little of either (the glass),
a superabundance of watercolor in relation to graphite line (the wine bottle), the predominance
of line over color and a surfeit of graphite (the carafe). Thus the act of
making carafe, bottle, and fruit by means of pencil and watercolor is as much the
subject matter of the still life as the carafe, bottle, and fruit themselves, arranged in
the studio for painting. At the same time the process of making that Still Life with
Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit shows off takes the incipient novelties of earlier works like
Three Pears—the use of repeated contours, the employment of white paper as both
figure and ground, volume and space, and the floating free of patches of pencil
hatching—and pushes them to the point that the old linear sequence from line and
shade to coloring in is, if not inverted, stretched and opened up into a circle, the unidirectional
movement between original concept and its fleshing out converted into a
dialogue without fixed conclusion between graphite and watercolor.
Much more than in the Getty still life, it is clear that Cezanne meant to let his
pencil work be everywhere evident, as a crucial part of the factural effect of Still Life
with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit. It is by no means underdrawing anymore, though clearly
Cezanne began by penciling in the composition, and it is more than likely that he
made his final touches in watercolor. But the pencil is everywhere available to the
eye; no infrared scanning is necessary to tease it out. It is to be seen in the line of
wall molding, the back and front lines of the ledge on which the objects sit. It repeatedly
marks the outlines of fruit—seven or eight apples and a bunch of grapes; the
glass that stands behind them; the tall, dark wine bottle; and the transparent, widebellied
carafe, replete with two different options as to where its neck ends, at the line
of wall molding or in the lip that rises above it. It can be seen in the label of the wine
bottle, and in the scribbled and curving marks on the wall surface behind the still
life (or is it a balcony railing?—probably not, but it recalls those views out open windows
with the rail and curving ironwork of a balcony in the foreground, such as
the one on the verso of another late landscape). 10 It is those marks, particularly the
scribbling to the right, that most suggest the loosing of graphite from its moorings
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CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO