Still Life in Watercolors

Cezanne and his wife, it became a home away from home for Cezanne, and after his
death it passed, along with his inheritance, to Paul, not to Hortense, who gave up her
share of it. Meanwhile, when Hortense fell sick, Cezanne instructed his son to take
care of her; when he himself became ill, he was cared for first by a housekeeper and
then by his gardener, and indeed on October 22, 1906, Hortense and Paul arrived at
the Les Lauves studio too late to be with Cezanne as he died. In short, even after his
marriage, Cezanne continued to live apart from his household and increasingly lived
his painting apart from his private life.
WHEN CEZANNE PAINTED HIS SON AND WIFE over the years, he most often
did so in a way that suggested no particular intimacy with them and gave
them no special status. As for his other subjects—landscape, genre, nudes, and still
life—they seem, for the most part, devoid of familial resonance. In the neighborhood
of still life, however, there are some early exceptions to this rule in the media of pencil
and watercolor. On one sketchbook sheet from about 1878 (fig. 10), Cezanne penciled
two views of his then six-year-old son: oriented differently on the page, like two
views of an apple, one faces outward with a shadow behind his head, while the other
sinks diagonally into the surface of the page as if it were a pillow, one in the upperright
and the other in the lower-left corner, depending on the orientation of the page.
Those views of his son's head, detached from the rest of his body, share space with
one partial view of a classical female figure (lower right); one complete view in a
very different "handwriting"—heavy, awkward, and recursive in its lines—of a male
nude with his arms outstretched (upper left); and one rendering of a drinking glass
spreading its shadow or reflection on the surface of the sheet of paper (middle left).
The latter is the only still-life item on the page, and it shares space with disparate
subject matter in the manner of sketchbook notes jotted down as they came to the
painter, possibly at different times, and as he moved the sheet around to find room
for his jottings. 18 Yet, no doubt unintentionally, their companionship on the same
sheet of paper links the seemingly impersonal to the personal—the studio study of
the glass to the tender rendering of his child. And the glass mediates formally between
the two views of Paul, one more intimate than the other: the deadpan portrait
gaze, with its foursquareness and its shadow, of the one and the sleepy sidelong look
and diagonal disposition of the other are somehow combined in the lines of the simple
glass.
In the exhibition there are some related sketchbook drawings of Paul at the
age of ten (pis. 2, 3). Cezanne drew his son this way numerous times. Part of a sketchbook
owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art that opens with several pages of
drawings of Paul asleep, this particular series of pages begins with a partial view of
the boy's wide-awake face set next to a drawing of his relaxed, partly uncurled hand
lying palm up. 19 On the verso of that page, overlapping parts of a bed frame and chair
22
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO