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Lot Essay
Dated by John Rewald circa 1877, the present painting represents a pivotal time in Cézanne's stylistic evolution; the transition from the Impressionist works of the earlier part of the decade to the innovative "constructivist" style of later years. The energetic execution and luminous atmosphere of Les deux vases de fleurs reflect the lingering influence of Impressionism, while the mounting vigor of color and clarity of form anticipate new directions in the artist's work. As Lawrence Gowing has explained, "The essential development of 1877 was that the atmospheric tones of Impressionism gave place to the intensity of local color; color, in fact, gained a kind of autonomy, and form, as if to serve it, became progressively simpler and more block-like" (L. Gowing, "Notes on the Development of Cézanne", The Burlington Magazine, vol. 98 [no. 639], June 1956, p. 188). The significance of this period in Cézanne's artistic development has long been recognized by critics and collectors. In 1938 Fritz Novotny declared:
In some ways the works of this phase--the last part of the seventies and the time around 1880--provide a more distinct expression of the space-forming principles of Cézanne than do the works of the succeeding periods. They do so in a more remarkable, less complicated fashion. Within Cézanne's evolution, their style appears like a clearly formulated program . . . (quoted in Rewald, op. cit., p. 272).
The present work is one of six floral still-lifes that Cézanne painted around this time (fig. 1). Arguably the boldest and most experimental of the group, it depicts a richly colored bouquet, almost savage in its luxuriance, bursting forth from a superimposed pair of porcelain vases. The blossoms are painted not with the flickering touch of the Impressionists but with assertive, impastoed strokes. The canvas is subsumed in a riot of local color, seductive mauve and sonorous forest green vying for prominence with warm goldenrod and a delicate confetti of white and rose. Behind the bouquet at the top right hangs a painting, its subject indistinguishable. The image appears unframed, as though it adorned not a collector's home but a painter's studio; it thus serves to underscore the status of the still-life as the product of artistic labor, of willful experimentation with color and form.
That Cézanne should have chosen still-life as a vehicle for aesthetic exploration during this seminal period is not surprising. Still-life, in contrast to landscape and portraiture, allowed Cézanne to work and re-work a single composition as long as he wished; as the painter Emile Bernard explained, "He needed time in order to move forward, and he found it in the presence of skulls, green fruit or . . . flowers. It was in this genre that he best showed what he was capable of" (quoted in Cézanne, Finished-Unfinished, exh. cat., Kunstforum, Vienna, 2000, p. 208). Cézanne himself understood the centrality of still-life to his artistic pursuit, writing to Joachim Gasquet, "You see, what I have not yet been able to attain, what I--I feel it--will never attain with the human face, in the portrait; here I have perhaps approached it, in these still-lifes" (quoted in ibid., p. 208).
The vase in the foreground of the present picture also appears in a still-life of peonies by Pissarro (fig. 2), revealing a close collaboration between the two artists. Cézanne, nine years Pissarro's junior, first joined the venerable Impressionist at Pontoise in the summer of 1872. During the next decade, the two artists executed at least twenty paintings side-by-side in Pontoise, Auvers and its environs, and also made eight portraits of one another. Pissarro's tutelage was instrumental in the development of Cézanne's mature style; as Roger Fry has written, "Pissarro put into his hands a technical method in which all was calculated beforehand, in which one proceeded with methodical deliberation and strict precaution, step by step, touch by touch, towards a preconceived and clearly envisaged goal . . . It turned him away from the inner vision and showed him the marvelous territory of external vision . . ." (R. Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development, New York, 1958, pp. 34-35). Writing to Emile Bernard about the significance of this new method, Cézanne explained:
One is neither too scrupulous, too sincere, nor too submissive before nature; but one is more or less master of his model, and above all his means of expression. One must penetrate what lies before him, and strive to express himself as logically as possible (quoted in ed. J. Rewald, Paul Cézanne, Correspondence, Paris, 1937, p. 262).
Elsewhere, Cézanne explicitly acknowledged his artistic debt to Pissarro. As late as the 1900s, he listed himself in an exhibition catalogue as "Paul Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro". He described Monet and Pissarro as "the two great masters, the only two", and elsewhere wrote, "As for old Pissarro, he was a father to me; someone to turn to for advice, somebody like the good Lord Himself" (quoted in White, op. cit., p. 109). Pissarro, in turn, was a staunch supporter of Cézanne's work. He invited Cézanne to participate in the inaugural Impressionist exhibition in 1874, helped to persuade Vollard to mount Cézanne's first retrospective in 1895 and purchased at least forty of the younger artist's paintings for his own collection. He also praised Cézanne's work to collectors, writing to Théodore Duret in 1873, "If you are looking for something out of the ordinary, I think Cézanne is the man for you; he has made some very strange studies, his vision is unique"; and he championed his fellow painter to critics, questioning J.-K. Huysmans in 1883, "Why is it that you do not say a word about Cézanne, whom all of us recognize as one of the most astounding and curious temperaments of our time and who has had a very great influence on modern art?" (quoted in ibid., p. 109). As Pissarro himself recalled in a letter to his son Lucien in 1896, "For thirty years [I] defended him with so much energy and conviction!" (quoted in ibid., p. 109).
The present picture is one of several that Cézanne is known to have made while staying with Pissarro in 1877, a year which saw particularly close collaboration between the two artists (fig. 3). According to Rewald, Lucien Pissarro identified another still-life by Cézanne, Nature morte à la soupière (Rewald 302, Musée D'Orsay, Paris) , as having been executed in 1877 in the studio at Pontoise, and even recalled Cézanne borrowing a red flowered shawl from Mme Pissarro to use as a tablecloth. He also remembered a landscape by Cézanne, L'étang des soeurs à Osny, près de Pontoise (Rewald 307; Courtauld Institute Galleries, London), as having been painted during the 1877 sojourn. Moreover, of the numerous pairs of paintings that the two artists made side-by-side, the version by Pissarro is dated in three cases to 1877; in one of these, the motif depicted is the orchard behind the older artist's house at Pontoise (Pissarro and Venturi 387; Rewald 311). The close rapport that Pissarro and Cézanne enjoyed at this time did not go unnoticed; in a review of the 1877 Impressionist exhibition (in which Pissarro had urged his friend to participate), one critic stated, "Pissarro and Cézanne, who have supporters, together form a school apart, and even two schools within one" (quoted in White, op. cit., p. 132). Notably, Nature morte à la soupière, L'étang des soeurs and Cézanne's orchard view all belonged originally to Pissarro, and it is possible that the present work did as well. Rewald has suggested that it may be the picture that Mary Cassatt mentions in a letter to Duret dated 30 November 1904:
In response to your letter, I have no intention of selling my Cézanne still life; but I know that the Pissarros have a painting of flowers by him which they intended to sell if they found an amateur--Mme Pissarro told me that she was going to have a sale in the spring of everything her husband left; but I know that in the meanwhile if she found someone willing to pay the asking price she would accept. She also has several landscapes by Cézanne that I am not familiar with" (quoted in N. Matthews, Cassatt and her Circle: Selected Letters, New York, 1984, p. 295).
In the preface to his monograph on Cézanne, Meyer Shapiro provided a description of the artist's work which skillfully evokes the spirit of the present picture:
The visible world is simply not represented on Cézanne's canvas. It is re-created through strokes of color among which are many that we cannot identify with an object and yet are necessary for the harmony of the whole. If his touch of pigment is a bit of nature (a tree, a fruit) and a bit of sensation (green, red), it is also an element of construction which binds sensations or objects. The whole presents itself to us on the one hand as an object-world that is colorful, varied and harmonious, and on the other hand as the minutely ordered creation of an observant, inventive mind intensely concerned with its own process . . . In this complex process . . . the self is always present, poised between sensing and knowing, or between its perceptions and a practical ordering activity (M. Shapiro, Cézanne, New York, 1962, p. 10).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Fleurs dans un vase, circa 1877.
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
(fig. 2) Camille Pissarro, Bouquet de pivoines roses, 1873.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
(fig. 3) Cézanne and Pissarro in Pissarro's garden at Pontoise, 1877. (left to right: Alphonso, a medical student and amateur painter; Cézanne, seated; Lucien Pissarro; Aguiar, a medical student; Camille Pissarro).
(fig. 4) Paul Cézanne, Nature morte à la soupière, 1877.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
In some ways the works of this phase--the last part of the seventies and the time around 1880--provide a more distinct expression of the space-forming principles of Cézanne than do the works of the succeeding periods. They do so in a more remarkable, less complicated fashion. Within Cézanne's evolution, their style appears like a clearly formulated program . . . (quoted in Rewald, op. cit., p. 272).
The present work is one of six floral still-lifes that Cézanne painted around this time (fig. 1). Arguably the boldest and most experimental of the group, it depicts a richly colored bouquet, almost savage in its luxuriance, bursting forth from a superimposed pair of porcelain vases. The blossoms are painted not with the flickering touch of the Impressionists but with assertive, impastoed strokes. The canvas is subsumed in a riot of local color, seductive mauve and sonorous forest green vying for prominence with warm goldenrod and a delicate confetti of white and rose. Behind the bouquet at the top right hangs a painting, its subject indistinguishable. The image appears unframed, as though it adorned not a collector's home but a painter's studio; it thus serves to underscore the status of the still-life as the product of artistic labor, of willful experimentation with color and form.
That Cézanne should have chosen still-life as a vehicle for aesthetic exploration during this seminal period is not surprising. Still-life, in contrast to landscape and portraiture, allowed Cézanne to work and re-work a single composition as long as he wished; as the painter Emile Bernard explained, "He needed time in order to move forward, and he found it in the presence of skulls, green fruit or . . . flowers. It was in this genre that he best showed what he was capable of" (quoted in Cézanne, Finished-Unfinished, exh. cat., Kunstforum, Vienna, 2000, p. 208). Cézanne himself understood the centrality of still-life to his artistic pursuit, writing to Joachim Gasquet, "You see, what I have not yet been able to attain, what I--I feel it--will never attain with the human face, in the portrait; here I have perhaps approached it, in these still-lifes" (quoted in ibid., p. 208).
The vase in the foreground of the present picture also appears in a still-life of peonies by Pissarro (fig. 2), revealing a close collaboration between the two artists. Cézanne, nine years Pissarro's junior, first joined the venerable Impressionist at Pontoise in the summer of 1872. During the next decade, the two artists executed at least twenty paintings side-by-side in Pontoise, Auvers and its environs, and also made eight portraits of one another. Pissarro's tutelage was instrumental in the development of Cézanne's mature style; as Roger Fry has written, "Pissarro put into his hands a technical method in which all was calculated beforehand, in which one proceeded with methodical deliberation and strict precaution, step by step, touch by touch, towards a preconceived and clearly envisaged goal . . . It turned him away from the inner vision and showed him the marvelous territory of external vision . . ." (R. Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development, New York, 1958, pp. 34-35). Writing to Emile Bernard about the significance of this new method, Cézanne explained:
One is neither too scrupulous, too sincere, nor too submissive before nature; but one is more or less master of his model, and above all his means of expression. One must penetrate what lies before him, and strive to express himself as logically as possible (quoted in ed. J. Rewald, Paul Cézanne, Correspondence, Paris, 1937, p. 262).
Elsewhere, Cézanne explicitly acknowledged his artistic debt to Pissarro. As late as the 1900s, he listed himself in an exhibition catalogue as "Paul Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro". He described Monet and Pissarro as "the two great masters, the only two", and elsewhere wrote, "As for old Pissarro, he was a father to me; someone to turn to for advice, somebody like the good Lord Himself" (quoted in White, op. cit., p. 109). Pissarro, in turn, was a staunch supporter of Cézanne's work. He invited Cézanne to participate in the inaugural Impressionist exhibition in 1874, helped to persuade Vollard to mount Cézanne's first retrospective in 1895 and purchased at least forty of the younger artist's paintings for his own collection. He also praised Cézanne's work to collectors, writing to Théodore Duret in 1873, "If you are looking for something out of the ordinary, I think Cézanne is the man for you; he has made some very strange studies, his vision is unique"; and he championed his fellow painter to critics, questioning J.-K. Huysmans in 1883, "Why is it that you do not say a word about Cézanne, whom all of us recognize as one of the most astounding and curious temperaments of our time and who has had a very great influence on modern art?" (quoted in ibid., p. 109). As Pissarro himself recalled in a letter to his son Lucien in 1896, "For thirty years [I] defended him with so much energy and conviction!" (quoted in ibid., p. 109).
The present picture is one of several that Cézanne is known to have made while staying with Pissarro in 1877, a year which saw particularly close collaboration between the two artists (fig. 3). According to Rewald, Lucien Pissarro identified another still-life by Cézanne, Nature morte à la soupière (Rewald 302, Musée D'Orsay, Paris) , as having been executed in 1877 in the studio at Pontoise, and even recalled Cézanne borrowing a red flowered shawl from Mme Pissarro to use as a tablecloth. He also remembered a landscape by Cézanne, L'étang des soeurs à Osny, près de Pontoise (Rewald 307; Courtauld Institute Galleries, London), as having been painted during the 1877 sojourn. Moreover, of the numerous pairs of paintings that the two artists made side-by-side, the version by Pissarro is dated in three cases to 1877; in one of these, the motif depicted is the orchard behind the older artist's house at Pontoise (Pissarro and Venturi 387; Rewald 311). The close rapport that Pissarro and Cézanne enjoyed at this time did not go unnoticed; in a review of the 1877 Impressionist exhibition (in which Pissarro had urged his friend to participate), one critic stated, "Pissarro and Cézanne, who have supporters, together form a school apart, and even two schools within one" (quoted in White, op. cit., p. 132). Notably, Nature morte à la soupière, L'étang des soeurs and Cézanne's orchard view all belonged originally to Pissarro, and it is possible that the present work did as well. Rewald has suggested that it may be the picture that Mary Cassatt mentions in a letter to Duret dated 30 November 1904:
In response to your letter, I have no intention of selling my Cézanne still life; but I know that the Pissarros have a painting of flowers by him which they intended to sell if they found an amateur--Mme Pissarro told me that she was going to have a sale in the spring of everything her husband left; but I know that in the meanwhile if she found someone willing to pay the asking price she would accept. She also has several landscapes by Cézanne that I am not familiar with" (quoted in N. Matthews, Cassatt and her Circle: Selected Letters, New York, 1984, p. 295).
In the preface to his monograph on Cézanne, Meyer Shapiro provided a description of the artist's work which skillfully evokes the spirit of the present picture:
The visible world is simply not represented on Cézanne's canvas. It is re-created through strokes of color among which are many that we cannot identify with an object and yet are necessary for the harmony of the whole. If his touch of pigment is a bit of nature (a tree, a fruit) and a bit of sensation (green, red), it is also an element of construction which binds sensations or objects. The whole presents itself to us on the one hand as an object-world that is colorful, varied and harmonious, and on the other hand as the minutely ordered creation of an observant, inventive mind intensely concerned with its own process . . . In this complex process . . . the self is always present, poised between sensing and knowing, or between its perceptions and a practical ordering activity (M. Shapiro, Cézanne, New York, 1962, p. 10).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Fleurs dans un vase, circa 1877.
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
(fig. 2) Camille Pissarro, Bouquet de pivoines roses, 1873.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
(fig. 3) Cézanne and Pissarro in Pissarro's garden at Pontoise, 1877. (left to right: Alphonso, a medical student and amateur painter; Cézanne, seated; Lucien Pissarro; Aguiar, a medical student; Camille Pissarro).
(fig. 4) Paul Cézanne, Nature morte à la soupière, 1877.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris.