Bouquet de fleurs

By 1902 Cézanne was in his sixties, living quietly in Aix-en-Provence and painting the same mountain over and over. Flowers were rare for him, and he worked so slowly that a real bouquet wilted long before he finished. So for this one he leaned on a picture he loved, a vase of flowers by Eugène Delacroix, the Romantic master he had idolized since youth. What he made from it is looser and heavier, the blooms built up from patches of colour rather than drawn. The canvas later travelled to Moscow, bought by Ivan Morozov, a textile heir who was assembling one of the great collections of new French painting before the First World War.