Cézanne - Still Life with Peppermint Bottle

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was said to have "consolidated Impressionism". And, indeed, he did not draw before painting: on the contrary, he created space and perspective through his clever use of flat areas of colour, freely associated, but at the same time contrasted and compared.

"Still Life with Peppermint Bottle" kept at the Musée d'Orsay is a still life painted like a landscape. A wooden entablature covered with fabric presents a relief of hills in fleece drapery made in a Provençal print, crowned by the snowy peak of a white tablecloth topping this veritable little Mont Ventoux of a table! In these valleys of fabric: red, yellow, serene apples mark the locations of hypothetical dwellings. Emerging from the relief, almost at the top of the snowy peak, a bottle of peppermint accompanied by an empty stemmed glass and a large carafe of water in the wavering transparency of which one can read a certain painting of drunkenness. The drunkenness of the peaks without doubt!

Cézanne painted about 300 paintings and among his first "pictorial obsessions", still lifes come first, and in particular apples. For Cézanne, still life is a motif like any other, equivalent to a human body or a landscape, but which lends itself particularly well to research on space, the geometry of volumes, the relationship between colors and forms: "When color is at its power, form is at its fullness" he said. Instead of the chronometric notation of phenomena, Cézanne preserved the emotion of the moment. He composed his still lifes, deliberately varying the lines and masses, arranging the draperies according to premeditated rhythms, avoiding accidents of chance, seeking plastic beauty, but without losing anything of the true motif, of this initial motif that one grasps naked in his sketches and his watercolors, of "this delicate symphony of juxtaposed nuances, which his eye discovered first, but which his reason immediately and spontaneously came to support on the logical support of a composition, a plan, an architecture."

(Text: Francis Rousseau)