Inspired by an article on the We Are OCA website which presented a beautiful still life by Paul Cézanne, I took some more time to read about the artist. I new his name since a long time and had a superficial liking for the paintings I had seen, but never looked in any more detail or depth until now.
Paul Cézanne 1902 Apple, Bottle and Chair Back
The article is about the exhibition ‘Mantegna to Matisse’ at Courtauld Gallery, and author Jim points to its relevance for both students of drawing and watercolour. Indeed I was unsure to which of these two courses, which I’m now studying in parallel, I would associate my own Blog article. I chose the Watercolour Blog because I was attracted by a painting rather than a drawing. But probably this choice is arbitrary because I don’t know yet in what ways knowing more about Cézanne might influence my own development. I might review this aspect at a later time!
As usual, I began with a Google search about Paul Cézanne and found the German Wikipedia article about him very interesting and insightful. While I typically start with the English Wikipedia, this time I preferred to read the German article because it appeared to cover the artist’s life and work in greater depth. It is even marked with a Wikipedia star for article quality and might thus be still more informative than the French article.
Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906), French painter, was born in Aix-en-Provence and lived in the south of France for most of his life, but he also lived in Paris for some time. He had been married to his long-standing painting model Marie-Hortense Fiquet and they had a son, but their marriage wasn’t happy – presumably because of Paul Cézannes difficult personality, illustrated by quotes from his closer friends several times in the Wikipedia article. But his influence on contemporary painters must have been enormous. The article mentions Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and André Derain and reports relationship with many other artists. Cézanne’s work is now seen as the foundation of ‘Classical Modernism’. As the English Wikipedia article puts it:
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne “is the father of us all” cannot be easily dismissed.
From the many paintings presented in the article I especially liked ‘The Card Players’ because of its beautiful colouring. The tones are beautifully shaded and very lively. For example, the brown table contains all brown tones from dark umber to yellow ochre, or the green jacket of one of the player has a multitude of different shades of green.
Paul Cézanne 1892-95 The Card Players
I also very much like one of his earlier works, ‘Snow Melting’, painted around 1870 in very dark colours (except for the snow), which seemed to have been typical for the painter’s early years. It was only from around the mid-1870s that he changed his colour choice to more brighter tones, reportedly influenced by his friend, painter Camille Pissaro.
Paul Cézanne ca. 1870 Snow melting
A search for Cézanne’s watercolour paintings brought up beautiful watercolour still life of fruit on a dish, mentioned in a Guardian article from January 2002. The original painting had long been confounded with a fake painting of excellent quality. The article reports that the original is now owned by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology, but unfortunately I could not locate it on their website, so found no further information about its title or date of painting for now. It was not included in their online collection of paintings, but I found information about a ‘Print Room’ at the museum presenting not only prints but also drawings, and it might be included there. I was just a little bit surprised that watercolour paintings are called ‘drawings’ which reminded me of the difficulty to distinguish between painting and drawing.
Paul Cézanne (undated) Still Life with Peaches and Figs
And indeed, the painting is included in the drawings collection… It is not dated. It was made with graphite and watercolour on white paper, its size is around 20 x 30 cm. It very much looks like a study for the very Cézanne-like still life oil paintings of fruit decorated on a table, but with watercolour it is much lighter, less massive in character than what I see in Cézannes oil paintings.
References
OCA article: Mantegna to Matisse, by Jim on 30 August 2012
http://www.weareoca.com/fine_art/mantegna-to-matisse/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mantegna-to-matisse
Paul Cezanne, German Wikipedia article
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne
English Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne
The Guardian (16 January 2002) ‘The real thing. Cézanne that eluded Nazis goes on show’, retrieved 1 September 2012 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/jan/16/maevkennedy
Ashmolean Museum of Art & Architecture, Paintings Collection
http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objects/?mu=130
Ashmolean Museum of Art & Architecture, Cézanne in the Drawings Collection
http://www.ashmolean.org/php/makegall.php?db=wadrawings&view=llisti&all=&arti=cezanne&titl=&mat=&prov=&sour=&coll=&acno=&strt=1&s1=&s2=&s3=&dno=&what=Search