Flowers in a blue vase

Cezanne worked slowly, staring and adjusting, building a picture over many long sittings. For him a vase of flowers was never about the prettiness of a bouquet but about its structure, the way a blue vase, a few stems and the wall behind settle into one solid arrangement of colour and weight, as deliberate as building in stone. He would return to the same setup day after day. Cut flowers could not survive that kind of attention, wilting and dropping long before he was finished, so he often painted paper ones instead, which would sit still for as long as he needed.