Flowers in a Blue Vase

This small still life was once part of something larger. Cézanne left the canvas unfinished around 1880, and at some point between 1904 and 1914 a dealer cut it into at least two pieces and painted over the raw edges so each piece could pass as a finished picture. Paul Guillaume bought one of the halves, a flowers and fruit painting, from the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1931. His widow Domenica later bought this half without knowing what it was. Both ended up in the same Paris collection, and only in 1992 did the curator Michel Hoog work out that they had been cut from one canvas. The overpaint has since been removed, and the cream-coloured priming Cézanne laid down shows again along the cut.