Still Life with Curtain and Flowered Pitcher
Paul Cézanne, 1899
For now, just to look at
The photograph we have of this work is not sharp enough to print at the quality we want, so we are not selling it for now. We are looking for a better one.
About the work
- Artist
- Paul Cézanne
- Date
- 1899
- Collection
- State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
- Reference
- XDV-3378
What the museum label doesn't tell you
Look at the plates: none of them quite sit flat, as if the table tilted differently for each piece of fruit. That's not clumsiness, it's Cézanne looking at the same still life from several angles at once. Stranger still: he painted this exact arrangement, same flowered jug, same curtain, same oranges, twice, almost identically. This version stayed in the Hermitage; months later he repeated the scene for the painting now in the Orsay. He wasn't indecisive, he was chasing a balance he couldn't confirm was ever settled. How many attempts does it take to know a picture is finished?
