Painting Collection Paul Cézanne The Dark Blue Vase, III (1839—1906) Paul Cèzanne painted this intimate picture in the midst of an artistic transition. He was moving away from an Impressionist style and creating compositions with distinct brushstrokes and dynamic color relationships that abstract the subject matter. The artist preferred still lifes to human subjects, but he found flowers to be more frustrating than fruit, as flowers wilted. He was even known to replace the blossoms with paper versions while he finished a canvas. In this floral study, Cèzanne surrounded his subjects with color fields of yellow, purple, and blue, flattening the composition and framing the loose arrangement of blossoms. Cèzanne painted two pinkish peonies as circles of geometric marks, dabs and dashes, while a single poppy in bright orange and red with a slim stem reaches up to the top of the picture. The artist contrasted the colorful arrangement with a dark vase that has its own painted flowers cascading down the surface. Cèzanne used thin washes of color in some areas, leaving raw canvas bare in others, as if the work was sketched hastily. —Danielle O'Steen, Ph.D. |
  
Join Our Mailing List
|
