El jarrón de tulipanes

Cezanne started this the way he started many canvases, by laying the whole arrangement in with thin, watery blue paint straight onto the ground. That blue is still there in the finished picture, showing along the edges of the vase and the fruit, because he never covered it over.

He was working around 1890, in his early fifties, dividing his time between Paris and Aix in the south. Flowers were awkward for a painter this slow, since a cut bouquet gave out long before he was finished, and he is known to have painted from artificial ones to keep an arrangement from changing under him. Conservators at the Art Institute, who have put his still lifes under the microscope, describe him coming back to a canvas at intervals and varying the transparency of the paint each time.

The canvas is about 60 by 42 centimetres. It reached Chicago in 1933 with the Coburn memorial gift.