Still Life in Watercolors

But what have these to do with still life? A larger, watercolored page from a
different, slightly later notebook (mid-i88os), also in the collection of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art (figs. 11, 12), helps to provide the answer. It has a still life
with knife and carafe on the recto of .the page and a bed and bedside table (which
looks remarkably like the table Cezanne used in his studio) on the verso, so that studio
and bedroom are literally flip sides of each other. It is one of many such conjunctions
in Cezanne's pencil and watercolor notebook work, and it points back to the
bed and chair backs in the sequence of pages just described. Not still life in the traditional
sense, they are just that in the literal meaning of the phrase: inanimate objects
that do not move. They are like the furnishings in some of the still lifes proper, such
as Still Life with Basket; or, The Kitchen Table, and they provide the missing link
between still life and other spaces of domestic use and human habitation. They are
also tied to the renderings of Cezanne's son: awake, perhaps sitting up in a chair in
one, asleep and immersed in a bed in the two others, his detached hand in a sleeping
position that recalls the waking body language of sitting at a table and drawing or
writing. And they suggest one of the prime thought processes of the studio, in which
the genre of still life and the medium of pencil and watercolor on paper participate
equally: the note-taking linkage of disparate spaces and subjects in the unconscious
logic of notebook sequencing and recto/verso alternation. Elsewhere Cezanne would
tie bodies to apples and oranges on single sheets, and in this notebook and others he
runs through the entire range of subjects that used to make up the old academic hierarchy
of genres: history painting and the nude, genre imagery, portraiture, landscape,
still life. But in certain sequences the relationships among the furnishings of the studio
and the house, the space of still life, and human intimacy are more direct and
poignant.
In 1885 Cezanne sketched his wife, as he had done earlier with his son, with
her head sinking diagonally into a pillow (upper right), on the same page with a
more fully rendered hydrangea blossom (left), again oriented differently, requiring
the turning of the page (horizontal for Hortense's head, vertical for the flower) or the
viewer's head to see each in its proper orientation (fig. 13). As in the pages on which
Paul is shown sleeping, Hortense's head seems to sink sleepily into the paper as if it
were a pillow from which she gazes half-awake, not quite at her viewer, with pillow
folds, wisps of hair, and crease in the neck all caught with a delicate pencil that then
produces, as if automatically, a hovering, caressing set of hatch marks, detached from
their referent, just barely attaching her to the cream surface of the paper. Unlike the
page with the two views of his son's head, and despite the fact that one is filled in
with watercolor and the other not, the drawings on this sheet must have been done
at the same time, for there is a conscious punning of names between Hortense and
the French word for hydrangea, hortensia, as if the sketch sheet were a natural place
for wordplay to join hands with the working out of visual ideas, where linguistic play
can be tried out as a visual analogy (which is discovered to yield as much difference
as similarity). 20 Here there seems little to link the two sketches but the names of their
subject matter—except perhaps the feminine connotations of the flower, not to mention
28
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO