Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 19
Nicolas Poussin
(French, 1594-1665)
Landscape with the
Body ofPhodon Carried
out of Athens, 1648
Oil on canvas, 114 x 175 cm
(44 7 /s x 68 7 /s in.)
Cardiff, National Museum of
Wales. Lent by the Earl
of Plymouth, NMW A (L) 480
Foreground, middle ground, and background:
as schematic divisions of the space
seen through an illusory window or behind a
fictive proscenium arch, these sectors are
as important as the horizon line to the space
of landscape painting. And they are particularly
characteristic of the French classical
landscape, from that of Nicolas Poussin and
Claude Lorrain down to late eighteenth- and
early- to -mid-nine teen th -cen tury inheritors
of the tradition of the paysage historique,
such as Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-
Etna Michallon, Jean-Victor Bertin, andJean -
Baptiste-Camille Corot 3 This was the tradition
to which Cézanne felt himself to belong.
To show how this worked, one would usually
paira Mont Sainte-Victoire with Poussin's
most canonical heroic landscape, that showing
the burial ofPhodon (fig. 19).
But it is a still life like the Getty watercolor
whose navigation of foreground, middle
ground, and background stands up to comparison
with something like Poussin's famous
landscape and does so much better than any
of Cezanne's actual landscapes. For just as
Poussin cut a winding path from front to back
of his composition so that the viewer could
follow the narrative course of the movement
of the burial, so the apples of this still life
move us carefully and windingly from front to
middle to back, only this time the meandering
movement they trace is the circuit of the
eye around a little pot and back through the
folds of a piece of tapestry, rather than a
funeral's solemn traversal of space. Hollowing
out the mound of fruit that was the staple
of the still-life tradition, so that all that is
left of its single, mounded mass are its points
of dispersal, and inverting the massing of
solids that continued to be so central to still
life into the point-by-point plotting of a
course that is more familiar in landscape
painting, it is as if Cézanne had declared the
genre of still life to be the proper place for
the transformation of the classical narrative
of the hero's journey through life into the
itinerary of the viewing subject's encounter
with objective space.
In a famous remark, Cézanne said that
he wanted to paint Balzac's "tablecloth white
as a layer of newly fallen snow, upon which
the place-settings rise symmetrically,
crowned with blond rolls, " so that "if I really
balance and shade my place-settings and
rolls as they are in nature, then you can be
sure that the crowns, the snow, and all
the excitement will be there too." 4 Thus he
not only spoke to the relationship between
the literary and the pictorial, the objective
and the subjective, but also articulated
the relay between landscape and still life.
Indeed, he suggested that he wanted still life
to do the job of landscape, if not that of
history painting as well. If the apocrypha
are true, and Cézanne really wanted to redo
Poussin "after nature, " then still life, more
than any of the other genres he practiced,
was the one in which he truly attempted to
carry out that project. 5
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CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO