Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906)
Nature morte avec pommes sur un buffet (Still Life with Apples on a Sideboard)
1900–1906
Watercolor over pencil on paper, 48.58 × 63.18 cm
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
The watercolor medium arrived rather late in France. After a glowing history in British 18th- and early 19th-century art, it crossed the Channel in the work of a bilingual English artist, Richard Bonnington, and his friends the French artists Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix. Although the French artists made distinguished contributions to the medium, watercolor did not in fact become central to French painting until the 1870s, when the impressionists practiced it fervently. The Reves collection is particularly rich in watercolors, but its crown jewel in the medium is this great Cézanne still life. Although one could have a full and complete discussion of the careers of Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Gauguin without ever mentioning watercolor, it would be impossible to do so for Cézanne. The watercolor medium was central to his technique as an artist, and as his career progressed, his oil technique increasingly resembled that of his watercolors. Indeed, his reliance on the primed canvas as a positive element in his late oil paintings would have been inconceivable without a knowledge of watercolor technique. This late watercolor is among the very finest of Cézanne‘s career. Along with a small group of equally large and complex sheets scattered in major collections in the United States, Switzerland, France, and Britain, this watercolor is the apogee of his art. “Impressionist Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection,” page 131. (DMA)