Still Life in Watercolors

Figure 26
Gustave Caillebotte
(French, 1848-1894)
Still Life with Glasses,
Carafes, and Compotiers
of Fruit, 1879
Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm
(i9 11 /i6 x 23 5 / 8 in.)
Collection of Candy and
Aaron Spelling
It is hard not to think of them when one looks at some of Cezanne's watercolor notes
from the eighties and later, with the barest hint of watercolor to flesh out their minimally
penciled forms on the surface of the paper. In such still-life notes, there is no
question of the larger bodily space that characterizes the more complex still lifes in
oil; rather, they inhabit the spatial degree zero of paper and show off the slightest
sleight of hand needed to raise objects off that paper with the delicate means of pencil
and watercolor. They suggest the other end of the Chardinian spectrum that was
so crucial to Cézanne: the simplicity of individual pieces of spherical fruit and the
means of crafting them on a flat surface, whether canvas, watercolor, or writing paper.
Gustave Caillebotte, the financier of the Impressionist group, might also have
been important to Cézanne, though the setting and social caste of the former's still
lifes (fig. 26) couldn't be at a further remove from Courbet's rustic world, and certainly
from Cezanne's. Caillebotte was not the only "Impressionist" painter to take up
still life, nor was he alone in suggesting the bourgeois supper with all its luxury
appointments and its art of cooking—Claude Monet too occasionally produced that
kind of still life—but Caillebotte was the most elaborate in opening up his still lifes
to a wider context, be it the marketplace in which the cook went to buy the family's
food or the dining room in which the family sat down to eat its breakfast, lunch, or
58
CÉZANNE IN THE STUDIO