黒い大理石の時計

Cézanne and Émile Zola had been boys together in Aix-en-Provence, and by the time Cézanne painted this still life around 1869, it was Zola, by then making his name as a novelist in Paris, who owned it. The objects sit like tokens of that friendship: a fine cup and saucer, a lemon, a pale conch shell, and a heavy ornate clock of black marble. The strange thing is the clock. Look at its face and there are no hands on it, so it tells no hour at all. The paint runs thick and rough in places, thin and transparent in others. It stayed in Zola's collection, one of the early canvases by a friend whose deliberate, unpolished work most Paris critics were still unwilling to take seriously.