Lot Essay
Czanne first mentioned a serious interest in the medium of watercolor in a letter to his childhood friend, Emile Zola, written in the summer of 1866. After describing his difficulties in completing an ambitious oil painting on which he was working, he noted, "I must buy a box of watercolors so that I can paint when I am not working on my picture." Except for a handful of minor sketches, Czanne's earliest watercolors, like the present work, date from the mid-1860s. While they are smaller in scale and must have been executed quickly, Czanne's first watercolors often resemble his early paintings in oil. Surprisingly dense and marked by deep, vibrant color and vigorous brushwork, they could astonish even his friends. As Fortune Marion would comment in a letter of 1867, his watercolors seemed "particularly remarkable, their coloration is amazing and they produce a strange effect of which I did not think watercolors capable." And, in fact, in most of his early watercolors, like the Maison en Provence, Czanne also used gouache, a more opaque medium that allows effects closer to those achieved with oil pigments. The striking intensity of its color and handling has shaped discussion of Czanne's Maison en Provence. In 1936, Charles Sterling described this work as one of Czanne's "most powerful early watercolors in which the influence of the Barbizon School and especially of Millet can still be detected." And in the catalogue to the 1954 Czanne retrospective in Paris, Sabine Cott noted the artist's preference here for forceful brushwork and "the brutality of contrasts to the refinement of colors and the precision of the drawing. Czanne does not content himself with exploiting the white of the paper; he reinforces the highlights with gouache and darkens the shadows through the superimposition of different greens." Yet its ordered, symmetrical composition, sketched out in thin pencil strokes and centered by the brilliant red roof, is also noteworthy. A related sketch of circa 1865 (Rewald watercolor no. 14), which Venturi argued depicts the same motif but from a different angle, does not achieve the same harmonious unity.
Czanne's son dated the Maison en Provence to 1874 (and he frequently and belatedly suggested dates and identified motifs in his father's oeuvre), but most scholars have placed the work within the painter's first decade. In the 1870s, in fact, Czanne's watercolor technique, like that of his early painting in oil, would change dramatically. And while he destroyed many of the early works, the artist must have cherished some of his first efforts in watercolor. For the third Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris in 1877, Czanne chose two watercolor landscapes from 1867 to include among the sixteen works he showed.
Czanne's son dated the Maison en Provence to 1874 (and he frequently and belatedly suggested dates and identified motifs in his father's oeuvre), but most scholars have placed the work within the painter's first decade. In the 1870s, in fact, Czanne's watercolor technique, like that of his early painting in oil, would change dramatically. And while he destroyed many of the early works, the artist must have cherished some of his first efforts in watercolor. For the third Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris in 1877, Czanne chose two watercolor landscapes from 1867 to include among the sixteen works he showed.