Still Life in Watercolors

of exhibitable work: the Impressionist exhibitions were the prime site for the display
of such painting. For the Impressionists; the esquisse and the croquis—notes toward,
first steps in the outlining of, a pictorial idea—and especially the ébauche—a more
fully worked-out compositional sketch preliminary to the work itself, to the laying
down and filling in of the design on the final canvas—became increasingly moot, since
their études after nature were their tableaux, and since, at least conceptually, they left
the studio behind. For Cézanne, it was a more complicated matter: he never really
left the studio behind, for all of his attachment to painting en plein air, sur le motif.
He had begun as a painter of concetti, or images of the mind, and though his subject
matter, his style, and even his approach underwent a revolution through his association
with Pissarro and the Impressionists, he nevertheless re-created the old world of
the studio in his private atelier and hung onto it throughout his life as a place to
learn and relearn his method and as a complement to, even a necessary grounding
of, his work out of doors. 7 Again, this is clearest in his still lifes, which are by definition
studio compositions, and in his watercolors, which formed a running parallel
to his work in oil and as such evoke the old sketch-versus-finished-picture dichotomy.
Many of Cezanne's watercolors, indoors and out, are very clearly études, distinguishable
from tableaux not so much in their status as exhibitable pictures as in
their focus on single items or isolated patches of nature: Foliage (fig. 30) and many
of his watercolor studies of rocks, branches, and forest undergrowth are clearly
études, whereas other watercolor sketches, such as those of Mont Sainte-Victoire (for
example, fig. 17), look more like ébauches in their compositional function and their
correspondence to oils of the same motif, though it is not clear that they were
preparatory to the oils in which he repeated the motif so compulsively. 8 (In any case,
the landscape ébauche is a bit of redundancy, since the compositional motif is given
in nature: perhaps Cezanne's watercolor versions of the motif were ways of trying
out the motif's relationship to different formats and hence different framings in a
medium associated with informality rather than finality.) Studio studies found in
this exhibition of items such as the green jug and the jacket on the chair also inhabit
the status of the étude fairly clearly in their isolation, their lack of compositional
complexity, and their one-to-one equation between piece of penciled and watercolored
paper and the item in the studio that it represents.
Similarly, Cezanne's slightly more complex still-life studies of the early and
middle years are clearly just that. His simple Decanter and Bowl of around 1879-82
(pi. 12), the single item multiplied by two, was evidently never meant to become a
realized pictorial composition, either in itself or in the medium of oil. Its simple
ledge with two items side by side, their forms laid in clearly and then just barely supplemented
by color notes in watercolor, is an étude of this object and that, each of
which would show up in grander, fully realized compositions in watercolor and oil,
but which correspond to no more fully rendered version of the same arrangement.
Their side-by-side-ness and the twosome that they make are too simple to qualify as
a composition. Slightly later, a further multiplication is seen in Apples and Pears of
the mid-i88os (pi. 13) and Apples, Bottle, and Glass of around 1895-98 (pi. 14), whose
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PICTURE AND SKETCH