Paul Cezanne, 'Still Life with Water Jug', about 1892-3

Cezanne’s still-life paintings are some of his most important works. Because it was left unfinished, this picture is a fascinating insight into how he planned and executed his compositions. It was one of half a dozen that he painted in the 1890s, all of which include the blue water jug we see here together with an array of fruit. If it had been completed, the painting would have ended up as a richly coloured arrangement, similar to Curtain, jug and dish of fruit (Private collection). The red and green apples and pears, and, on the left, possibly an orange, would have provided the colour highlights, with a broken loaf of bread laid out on a simple brown table. The tablecloth, carefully arranged with creases and folds, would probably have been white, contrasting with the fruit and the blue drapery.

As a still life, it is part of a tradition of painting that emerged in Italy and Holland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The genre allowed artists to demonstrate their virtuosity when it came to depicting different materials and surfaces: contrasting glass with metal cutlery, porcelain, linen and bread, for instance. Cezanne was less concerned with the highly finished surfaces and almost photographic realism that these artists produced. He was more interested in how the eye perceives such objects and how, by using colours of different intensities, he could make the rich reds, greens and oranges of the fruit or the cooler purply-blue of the water jug appear, in a sense, more real. So, for example, instead of using shading to define the shape of an apple, he would apply different intensities of red and green. 

With this half-finished painting we can see how he set about this. At the first stage he used sketchy brushstrokes of very dilute blue-grey paint to lay out the key angles of the perspectives he wanted to create: the tabletop, the knife set diagonally on it and the cloth hanging over the front edge. He then roughed out the outlines of the main components. We can see the shapes of the plates, the folds of the tablecloth and the drapery backdrop. Often an object has more than one outline: look at the bulging sides of the water jug or the circles defining the apples. Blurring the edges slightly in this way better reflects how we perceive forms and how they merge into another nearby object or the background. 

At the next stage he sketched in some of the predominant colour of each object with a few quick brushstrokes: the orange crust on the bread and the green and yellow pears and apples, the brown table and the blue-green fabric backdrop, for example. Then he worked more intensively on each object. Here, the form and colouring of the water pitcher are nearing completion and some of the apples have also had more detailed treatment. We do not know why the picture was never finished.