Still Life with Game Birds

Around 1872 Cézanne left Paris and moved out to Pontoise and Auvers, north of the city, to work beside Camille Pissarro, an older painter who was coaxing him out of his dark, heavily loaded early manner and teaching him to build a picture from patient touches of lighter colour. This dead-game still life belongs to those years. The subject itself is an old one. Hanging birds, the trophy of a day's shooting, had been a studio staple since Chardin and the Dutch masters before him, a test-piece of feathers and dull light. Cézanne takes that worn theme and works it slowly, weighing each patch of tone against the next. The painting came to Harvard in 1976, and it carries the number 206 in Lionello Venturi's catalogue of his work.