Still Life with Blue Pot

For Paul Cézanne, the still life was a principal theme in art. Using a repertoire of everyday objects such as fruit, jugs, bottles, and plates, he experimented with relationships of form, color, and pattern. Although the groupings seem casual, Cézanne is known to have taken great care with the arrangement, sometimes spending hours positioning the objects.

“Painting from nature is not copying the object,” he wrote, “it is realizing one’s sensations.” This brightly colored watercolor reflects this view and the artist’s steady fascination with color, light, pictorial space, and how we see.

P.S. Paul Cézanne is mostly known for still lifes but he was also a prolific portraitist. Here are Post-Impressionist portraits by the French master.