Il vaso blu

By around 1890 Cézanne had left the Paris exhibitions largely behind and was working in Provence, building his still lifes like architecture. Here a blue vase of flowers stands on a table with a plate, an apple or two, and an ink bottle, everything weighed against everything else. Look at the vase and you can see thin blue lines drawn around its edge, the seams where Cézanne kept adjusting the contour until the shape sat exactly right. He cared less for the flowers as flowers than for how their colours answered the cool blue of the glass and the warm ground behind. The painting entered the French national collection through the 1911 bequest of the collector Isaac de Camondo.