Cézanne in the Studio Still Life in Watercolors

In the last years of his life Paul

Cézanne produced a stunning series of watercolors, many of them sill lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these

late masterpieces that is now in the collection of the Getty Museum.

In Cézanne in the Study: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong

places this great painting within the context of Cezanne’s artistic and psychological

development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still

life—like the medium of watercolor—was traditionally considered to be “low” in

the hierarchy of French academic paintings. Cézanne chose to ignore this

hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolors that contained echoes of

grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin—the

“highest” of classical art forms. In so doing he changed his still lifes with

new meanings, both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in

the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and

creating, art.

Carol Armstrong’s study is a

fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolor paintings that brought

Cézanne’s career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion, The book includes

new photographic studies of the Getty’s painting that allow the reader to

encounter this great watercolor as never before, in all of its richness and

detail.