Skulls and Other Objects

While this watercolor would seem to be a straightforward representation of three skulls arranged on a floral rug, the history and identity of these objects is complex and stands in need of careful analysis.1

John Rewald, who was instrumental in the preservation of Cezanne’s Lauves studio, states that “the four skulls [Cezanne] used as models” are kept in his “studio at Les Lauves.”^[1] In fact, five skulls are preserved at the Atelier des Lauves. Three of these are intact and were on display at the time of writing in 2024; two in need of conservation were also made available.^[2] It is likely that Cezanne owned at least one skull by the mid-1860s, when he began to draw and paint individual skulls,^[3] but no witness recalls Cezanne owning any skulls until the 1880s. The artist’s niece Marthe Conil was the first to record some in his possession in a possibly unreliable account of a visit she made to the Grand Salon at the Jas de Bouffan, which Cezanne had turned into a studio after his father’s death in 1886. She recalled seeing “three skulls on the mantelpiece” there while Cezanne was working on his Mardi Gras (1888; FWN 668).^[4] In July 1902 Borély saw “three human skulls facing each other” on “a narrow center table” in the bedroom of the rue Boulegon apartment.^[5] But although both Émile Bernard and Ambroise Vollard recalled seeing the oil painting related to Chicago’s watercolor, Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet (fig. 13.1), in Cezanne’s Lauves studio in 1904 and 1905, only the former gave any hint that he saw real skulls there, when he stated that Cezanne “needed time to advance [a painting], and he found it in front of skulls, green fruit or paper flowers.”^[6]2

Rumors abound in Aix-en-Provence as to where Cezanne obtained his skulls (including some about clandestine arrangements with gravediggers). Cezanne’s close friend, the polymath Antoine-Fortuné Marion, discovered ancient skulls while excavating a neolithic cave settlement in the hills around Saint-Marc in 1866, but there is nothing to suggest that Cezanne obtained his skulls from him.^[7]3

The most distinctive skull in the watercolor Three Skulls is the one at the back (fig. 13.2). This represents the skull in the Lauves studio with damage to its (proper) left zygomatic bone, which has left a gap in the eye socket (fig. 13.3).^[8] This gap is also visible in Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet, now in the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland (fig. 13.4). In addition, the cranial sutures in this skull are only partially fused, making the vertical, metopic suture into the pronounced line that can be seen in Pyramid of Skulls (fig. 13.5). Cezanne did not represent this feature in The Three Skulls or Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet, however. The skull at the left of the watercolor (fig. 13.6) corresponds to a real counterpart that retains several back teeth on both sides (fig. 13.7). But although there is significant bone loss in the center of the upper jaw, this is not apparent in the watercolor or the oil painting. The distinctively squarish shape of the eye sockets (known as “aviator sunglasses”) in the actual skull is apparent in both works, however, as is the skull’s slightly pointed shape. The skull at right in The Three Skulls (fig. 13.8) is probably modeled on the one in the studio that has only a few teeth remaining in its lower left jaw and a jawline that slopes down to right (fig. 13.9). This skull also has the pronounced anterior nasal spine visible in the watercolor. 4

Figs. 13.2–13.9

Cezanne told Vollard that “a skull is a beautiful thing to paint,” but the interest skulls held for the artist went beyond their formal properties.^[9] For one thing, Cezanne’s paintings of them sit squarely within the genre of vanitas paintings popularized in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, which itself derives from a more ancient tradition in which skulls carry the message of memento mori.^[10] In Cezanne’s first vanitas painting, Skull and Candlestick (fig. 13.10), a skull is accompanied by wilting roses and an extinct candle, emblems of decay and the transience of life, and a book, symbolizing the worthlessness of human knowledge.^[11] Similarly, the skull in Cezanne’s Young Man and Skull (fig. 13.11) relates to those contemplated by Christian saints, particularly Jerome and Francis, in several paintings in the Louvre.^[12]5

The rug with a floral pattern in both The Three Skulls and Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet appears as well in several paintings and watercolors of the period.^[13] It also features—inverted—in a photograph taken by Robert Doisneau in 1945 (fig. 13.12). In some works, it appears alongside another rug whose floral motifs are integrated within a diamond-shaped diaper pattern.^[14] (John Rewald photographed this second rug around 1935.^[15] It can also be found on its own in several works.^[16]) The sole surviving segment of the rug in The Three Skulls is a rectangle of lightweight felt a few inches across (fig. 13.13) with a remnant of a floral pattern.6

The vertical, leftward-slanting, largely blank area on the right-hand side of The Three Skulls is difficult to decipher until the Solothurn oil is consulted, when it becomes clear that it represents the side of what seems to be a shallow box. The curved shape at the bottom of the watercolor is also unintelligible without interrogating the painting, where it appears to stand for an ornate border on the rug.^[17]7

Time and Place

There is nothing to indicate when or where The Three Skulls was executed. Stylistic evidence has been used, but this is somewhat imprecise, as it relies solely on visual analysis and comparisons.^[18] There is, however, a wealth of evidence concerning the date of Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet in Solothurn. But this information is sometimes contradictory and does not directly illuminate the relationship between the two works.8

Georges Rivière, the artist’s contemporary and the father-in-law of Paul Cézanne fils, states that this watercolor was made around 1898 in the studio Cezanne occupied in the Villa des Arts on the rue Hégésippe-Moreau in Paris—but his recollections are sometimes unreliable.^[19] A vividly colored rug is visible in both the painting and the watercolor. It also appears in two or possibly three other works, all of which feature a dark-red wall that is known to have been part of Cezanne’s Hégésippe-Moreau studio.^[20] But the only rug known to have been in this studio was described by Vollard as “faded.”^[21] And significantly, no painting of skulls with a red wall in the background survives, so Cezanne evidently did not paint any of his still lifes featuring skulls in Paris.9

Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet depicts a cool-colored wall, as do several other still-life paintings in which the same rug appears.^[22] One of these, Bouquet of Flowers (FWN 881), appears to have been painted in Cezanne’s studio at 23, rue Boulegon in Aix around 1902, since the poet Léo Larguier recalls seeing “a large bouquet of artificial flowers” in this “attic” studio that year.^[23] And in July 1903 the artist told the amateur painter Jules Borély that he had “a very good painted study” of skulls “in his attic” studio on the rue Boulegon that was related to the three human skulls his visitor had seen in the apartment below. Borély was nevertheless unable to view the painting because the maid had lost the key.^[24] This “study” could have been Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet or possibly Pyramid of Skulls (see fig. 13.5).^[25]10

While these recollections make it probable that Cezanne began the oil in his rue Boulegon studio, there is firm evidence that he continued to work on it in his studio at Les Lauves in 1904 and 1905, perhaps even in the absence of the skulls themselves.^[26] The artist and writer Émile Bernard recalled seeing “a canvas depicting three skulls on an Oriental carpet” in Cezanne’s “studio outside the city” when he first visited the painter in February 1904.^[27] When he visited again in March 1905, he found that “the skulls were nailed to the wall, abandoned.”^[28] However, Vollard remembered that when he went to Aix at the end of 1905 there “was a still life on the easel which [Cezanne] had started several years earlier, depicting skulls on an Oriental carpet.”^[29] By way of confirmation, the poet Joachim Gasquet, who was close to Cezanne at the time, recounted that even “at the end” of his life, the artist’s incurable romanticism “made him pile … skulls … on rich carpets in blue still lifes.”^[30] (For his part, Rivière states that Cezanne painted a “Skull on a Carpet” in his Lauves studio in Aix in 1903. Although no corresponding oil painting survives, there is a contemporary watercolor of this subject, Skull on a Drapery [1902–6; FWN 1986]).^[31] These various sources imply that Cezanne worked on Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet for some three years in total. Cezanne’s process was notoriously “slow and painful,” as Vollard put it.^[32]11

There is, however, one feature of the scene in The Three Skulls and Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet that has to be a permanent fixture of the room in which these works were begun, namely the chair rail or dado on the background wall that divides the compositions into a cooler, lighter section above and a darker, warmer one below. This object, or one very much like it, reappears in several other works, notably Still Life with Blue Pot (fig. 13.14).^[33] There is no dado, however, in any of the works known to have been painted on the rue Hégésippe-Moreau. It may have been in the rue Boulegon studio, but photographs taken after Cezanne’s death show that it was wallpapered after he vacated it and that it lacked a chair rail.^[34] Nor was there ever a chair rail in the Lauves studio, or in any part of the building it occupies.^[35] Nevertheless, the cumulative evidence indicates that The Three Skulls was made in Cezanne’s studio on the rue Boulegon. This could suggest that it was conceived and executed as a preliminary study for Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet. The idea that Cezanne’s watercolors had this subsidiary status has been conventional wisdom in the field, but several scholars in recent years have called it into question.12

Oil and Watercolor

One obvious rationale for making a preliminary watercolor is that the medium’s manipulability allows the artist to work out how to frame a motif and to find an optimal viewpoint before proceeding to finalize a composition in an oil.^[36] Moreover, even a large and relatively “finished” watercolor like The Three Skulls can be made in a matter of hours (sometimes over several days), while a fully realized oil such as Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet could take hundreds of hours over several years. This fact suggests that Cezanne used the repeated contours in The Three Skulls to, among other things, rough out the outline of the skulls as a preliminary to working on them in earnest. They could also indicate that he experimented with their positioning or with his viewpoint prior to settling them slightly to the right in the corresponding oil.^[37]13

Several scholars have nonetheless asserted that some key divergences between the Chicago watercolor and the Solothurn oil indicate that Cezanne’s watercolors are independent works of art that represent motifs of their own.^[38] Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet is significantly squarer, or about 10 percent deeper, than The Three Skulls. This is because both have standard-size supports. The oil is painted on a no. 15 figure (portrait) canvas,^[39] while the watercolor occupies a full Raisin sheet (see Technical Summary in the Technical Report). Cezanne was not constrained to adopt the particular size of canvas he chose for the oil, however. Notably, he could have chosen a no. 15 paysage (landscape) canvas (50 × 65 cm), which almost exactly reproduces the proportions of the Raisin sheet. His choice must have been motivated, therefore, by a desire to include the ornate border of the rug in the composition.14

In his 1907 memoir, Émile Bernard casts further light on how Cezanne employed watercolor. He recalls that the artist would “start with shadow, by making a stain that he covered with a second, more overflowing one, then a third, until all these hues, forming screens, modeled the object at the same time as coloring it.” Bernard continues: “I understood immediately that there was a law of harmony that guided his work, and that all these modulations had a direction determined beforehand in his mind. In short, he proceeded in the same way as ancient tapestry makers must have, making related colors follow one another until they met their contrasting complementary.”^[40] This suggests that Cezanne produced The Three Skulls to map out a set of harmonious color relationships according to a predetermined scheme, while in Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet he exploited the flexibility that only oil allowed to continually adjust the harmony more empirically, and painstakingly. This distinction is simplistic, however, particularly since Bernard writes that “Cézanne prepared scales on his palette for a whole gradation of colors, and he proceeded by applying them” to the canvas in his oils.^[41]15

Nevertheless, a watercolor like The Three Skulls, with its thin paint and many blank areas, is visually similar in these respects to oils of the kind that Bernard describes as merely “initial scales” of colors, whose progress “time had interrupted.”^[42] Once again, though, Bernard’s remarks cannot be taken to suggest that the watercolor was equivalent to the lay-in stage of the oil. This is because he also reported that Cezanne recommended laying in a painting with “almost neutral tons” and only subsequently “heightening the scale.”^[43]16

Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet is much darker, muddier, and narrower in tonal range than the Chicago watercolor as a result of having been so heavily reworked. A watercolor like The Three Skulls does not yield a “preview” of a corresponding oil, in other words, since its medium generates a chromatically purer, more contrasty, and more luminous harmony. Similar considerations have led Carol Armstrong to suggest that The Three Skulls and Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet “might be variations of each other in different media rather than preliminary study and final picture.”^[44] And conservators at the Art Institute of Chicago have argued that “Cezanne frequently painted the same subject in both watercolor and oil as a means of examining his subjects through the unique properties of each.”^[45]17

Cezanne clearly did intend some watercolors to be independent works of art equal in status to oil paintings, inasmuch as they have no counterparts in the other medium. Armstrong, for example, has argued that Cezanne’s Still Life with Blue Pot (see fig. 13.14) “is what the French call a tableau, a fully-fledged, finished picture in its own right, as distinct from a sketch (croquis), or a study (étude).”^[46] She bases this claim on the large size of the work, its technical accomplishment, and the complexity of its layered surface: all features exhibited by the Chicago watercolor as well. It seems perfectly possible, then, that Cezanne could have envisaged and made The Three Skulls as a self-sustaining work of art and only subsequently decided to explore how the motif would look in oil because he enjoyed the particular qualities of the medium.18

Armstrong goes even further in speculating that perhaps “the oil yielded the watercolor.” In the same spirit, Elisabeth Reissner has suggested that “the thin and translucent paint application that watercolor makes possible” in The Three Skulls may have enabled Cezanne to paint “thinly” (as John Rewald noted) in Pyramid of Skulls.^[47] Indeed, there are passages in Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet that indicate a similar kind of intermedial interchange.19

On balance, therefore, there is no conclusive evidence as to whether the Chicago watercolor or the Solothurn oil was begun first. 20

Technique

Cezanne employed graphite pencil and watercolor (both transparent and opaque), as well as the white paper support itself, in The Three Skulls (see Media in the Technical Report).^[48] In places, these are visually inextricable, particularly when the watercolor is viewed from a distance. The pencil lines stand out more clearly when the watercolor is seen close up, and better still in a reflected-infrared image (fig. 13.15).^[49]21

When viewed from the distance at which they were made (arm’s length), Cezanne’s watercolors exhibit a “sketchy” or unfinished appearance, as noted by art historian Matthew Simms.^[50] Most obviously, their color often tails off toward the periphery of the sheet, although not as dramatically in The Three Skulls as in some other works. Sometimes this leaves the white paper in these areas signifying nothing; or it could simply be a record of Cezanne’s lack of interest in articulating these areas further, as in the wall and the area below the rug.^[51] White paper often fulfills a more “active” role, however, in the more central areas of many watercolors. Its most simple function is to stand for highlights or white surfaces, but it can also indicate perceptual uncertainty on the artist’s part.^[52]22

Pencil, too, normally serves at least two distinct purposes in Cezanne’s watercolors: It delineates “contours,” which stand for the edges of objects, and it generates “hatchings,” which serve as shading.^[53] Conventional hatchings are difficult to identify in The Three Skulls, however, possibly because they tend to morph into contours in the artist’s later works.^[54] But there are loose indications of shading in the parallel, diagonal pencil lines at the top right of the two skulls center and right (see figs. 13.2, 13.8) and in the right eye socket of the one at right. Pencil contours are more widely distributed in The Three Skulls, but—uncharacteristically—few if any are “broken,” as they frequently are in other watercolors (as are many of the contours applied in watercolor).^[55] The equivocal, repeated pencil contours at the edges of all three skulls nonetheless attest to a similar “instability” or “flux” in Cezanne’s perceptual process.^[56] It is thus worth recalling in this context that the artist told Vollard while painting his portrait, “the edge escapes me.”^[57] This statement may owe something to Jean Désiré Régnier’s De la lumière et de la couleur chez les grands maîtres anciens of 1865, which argued that contours “vacillate” when we fixate on the edges of objects.^[58]23

The looseness and imprecision of Cezanne’s contours can also be explained perceptually as a technique that de-emphasizes drawing and modeling in favor of optical sensation.^[59] It may also be that very loose drawing of the kind Cezanne used in the skull at the left (see fig. 13.6), in particular, was meant to correspond to the blurry information Cezanne would have picked up when he squinted at the motif.^[60]24

Cezanne’s use of watercolor in The Three Skulls is no less multipurpose, according to Simms. In some places, the artist used strokes of color to define contours, either to “reinforce” those already stated in pencil or to shift them elsewhere.^[61] Thus, the blue contours on the skull at right (see fig. 13.8) correspond most closely to earlier pencil lines, while the predominantly red contour on the left of the skull at left (see fig. 13.6) attempts to settle the issue (left by the pencil lines) of precisely where the skull’s edge lies. Elsewhere, painted contours denote edges on their own, as in the top of the skull at the back (see fig. 13.2).^[62] This use of color is consistent with Cezanne’s employment of blue contours in his paintings merely as expedients, to hold edges in place before they were modeled in color.^[63] Cezanne did this because he believed that contours did not exist in principle, but that “the contour of objects is given by the oppositions and contrasts that result from the coloring particular to them.”^[64]25

Color also assumes the role of shading in Cezanne’s watercolors.^[65] When it does, it sometimes coincides with pencil hatching, but at other times color conflicts with the hatching or works independently as a result of the “non-alignment” between the two media.^[66] There is little pencil hatching in The Three Skulls, but where there is, there is some misalignment of this kind, particularly in the skull at right where the watercolor adds significantly to the shading of the eye sockets (see fig. 13.8). Different areas of watercolor are also misaligned, and hence either supplement one another or conflict in the information they supply. Notably, a broken blue contour that issues from the lower right of the right-hand skull emphatically announces an edge in the rug that earlier touches did not, whereas areas of local color simply refuse to correspond to watercolor contours in the lower edge of the red floral motifs below the skull at left. But although the media here are physically discontinuous, colors become assimilated to the contours around them optically because our spatial resolution is better for lines like this than it is for color.^[67]26

Simms argues that Cezanne’s use of pencil and watercolor amounts to operating “two systems of notation”: a “tonal” system geared toward “haptic” sensation, and a “chromatic” system which favors “optical” sensation.^[68] This argument has been criticized accordingly for not giving enough weight to Cezanne’s “interwoven acts of drawing and painting.”^[69] Simms does speak of Cezanne’s use of watercolor as a “hybrid medium,” however, and of “the dialogue between drawing and color” in his watercolors.^[70] And he acknowledges that Cezanne worked back and forth between the two different materials, sometimes going over watercolor with pencil.^[71] This tactic can be difficult to identify because of the transparency of watercolor; and it may be that Cezanne drew the repeated contours on the right-hand skull’s right side over areas of previously applied color.27

It could seem odd that the two white skulls in the foreground do not have the distinctly yellowish color seen in the corresponding oil, where only the skull at the rear is near white. But technical analysis has revealed that Cezanne did use yellowish wash, particularly on the skull at the left, which has now faded (see Technical Summary in the Technical Report). There are nevertheless passages in The Three Skulls that are both physically and perceptually “blank, not active.”^[72] Blank areas of this kind arise because Cezanne normally worked locally in watercolor, concentrating on defining edges, shading, and coloring in relatively isolated regions, whereas in oil he worked globally, attempting to create depth by adjusting all the colors in the painting to one another. By this account, when he worked from a watercolor to the corresponding oil, he had to “translate an (initial) denotation system based on (pencil) lines into the wholly different system wherein color defines spatial relationships.”^[73]28

“Translation” here is perhaps too weak a term, as the differences between the two media are sometimes very considerable. It is apparent from comparing the Chicago watercolor with the Solothurn oil that Cezanne was far more committed in the latter to the global treatment of color relationships.^[74] Oil also facilitates reworking much more readily than watercolor, and hence the surface of the painting is thickly painted overall, and in places very heavily. Indeed, the background pushing through the gap in the zygomatic bone of the rear skull, which is rendered with a few blue and reddish strokes in the watercolor (see fig. 13.2), needed paint more than 1 cm thick in the oil (see fig. 13.4). And while Cezanne was content to sketch out the color relationships between the top of the rearmost skull and the wall in the watercolor (fig. 13.16), the paint in the corresponding area of the oil is a thick enamel created by numerous thin applications of paint, which are designed to harmonize with the colors on either side of the edge (fig. 13.17).^[75] Similarly, the richly colored shadows in the eye sockets and nasal cavities of the skulls in the watercolor become dark and chromatically muted in the oil, as Cezanne continually reworked the color relationships in this work.29

Cezanne clearly spent a great deal more time attempting to resolve the color relationships in the oil than in the watercolor. In fact, Bernard recalled that during the month he spent in Aix in 1904, the painting “changed in color and form almost every day.”^[76] And despite telling Bernard that he could not attain what he called “réalisation” (satisfactory completion) in this work, Cezanne did tell Vollard the following year that he was coming close to achieving precisely this.^[77] In the last analysis, therefore, it was only in the flexible medium of oil that Cezanne could hope to achieve his ultimate ambition. 30

These differences notwithstanding, it is instructive to notice just how closely Cezanne followed the technique of The Three Skulls in one portion of Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet, namely the red floral motif at bottom center. It is evident that Cezanne achieved the local color he desired in this area of the watercolor by superimposing several layers of reddish pigment, some verging toward orange and others faintly bluish, some quite transparent and others more opaque (fig. 13.18; see also Technical Summary in the Technical Report).^[78] Although oil does not readily permit the same range of transparency, it is clear nonetheless that Cezanne did try to achieve similar effects in the Solothurn painting. Several layers of differently colored reddish paint can certainly be discerned in the corresponding area of this work (fig. 13.19), some of them exploiting the semitransparency of thinly applied oil paint. Sometimes, in other words, Cezanne did not “translate” from The Three Skulls when working on his oil so much as pay homage to it.31

Paul Smith
32

Technical Report

Technical Summary

Employing vivid transparent and opaque watercolor with graphite on bright-white paper, Cezanne painted a still life in the vanitas tradition, juxtaposing an ornate carpet symbolizing fleeting material wealth with skulls, symbols of death. His material choices and handling lend a luminosity that undermines the usual macabre atmosphere of such subjects. Instead, Cezanne achieved a surprising lightness and vibrancy while simultaneously confronting the viewer with man’s inevitable end.33

Cezanne selected a smooth, bright wove paper with an impressed Montgolfier watermark for this monumental watercolor. He used a full sheet of the standard size Raisin (48 × 63 cm);^[79] this is notable, as he used a full sheet only around forty times, all in his late career.^[80] The optical and physical properties of the paper play an important role in facilitating Cezanne’s convincing portrayal of form through light, line, and color. The bright-white paper both effectively reflects light from areas left in reserve and transmits light through the transparent watercolor washes, yielding brilliant hues in a manner analogous to light shining through colored glass. The paper’s relative lack of surface texture allowed the artist to sketch rapidly with his graphite pencil and control the flow of dilute washes into even areas of color.34

Cezanne’s pencil handling was relaxed and unrestrained in his late career. Using a graphite pencil, he drew the initial sketch, parts of which remain visible beneath washes and in paper reserves. These visible lines operate alongside the watercolor to define forms in the final work, particularly contour and shading within the skulls. An infrared image (fig. 13.15) reveals the preliminary drawing in which he used rapid, zigzag marks to indicate shadows on the carpet and in the recesses of the skulls after establishing their forms with repeating contour lines. As Adrien Chappuis observes, in Cezanne’s drawings “outlines are not defined by a single stroke, but by several strokes close together.”^[81] Cezanne likely alternated between graphite and watercolor applications. The transparent nature of watercolor makes it nearly impossible to determine whether graphite is under or over a transparent wash, even with microscope assistance, so no determination could be made here regarding where graphite may have been applied over watercolor passages. Cezanne painted some elements directly without preliminary drawing at this mature stage in his career, including the form extending into the right side of the composition (possibly furniture or a picture frame) and many details of the carpet’s design. The artist’s graphite sketching can be studied in relation to the final watercolor using the layered image viewer (fig. 13.24).35

Seven pigments were detected in Cezanne’s high-key palette: cobalt blue, indigo, emerald green,^[82] yellow ochre, vermillion, and a red lake of animal origin. Lead white was only detected in a mixture with cobalt blue. These pigments vary in their range of transparency: Vermillion, emerald green, and cobalt blue are inherently opaque pigments, while indigo and red lakes are renowned for their transparency. Cezanne manipulated his application of these watercolors to describe different materials—the skulls, carpet, and wall—and also to establish space within the composition.36

Cezanne defined the plane of the background wall with overlapping, transparent patches of wash and reserved paper. With his paper on a flat surface, Cezanne painted vertical strokes side by side and allowed the paint to flow outward, merging with adjacent brushstrokes into an amorphous color patch (fig. 13.20). Careful examination of wash applications, such as those above the skulls, reveals even color distribution, with some blue wash pooling at the top of the brushstrokes. This would not have been possible if the paper were upright on an easel, as the wash would have flowed downward. The paper has no pinholes, supporting the idea that it was painted on a table. Cezanne allowed each patch to dry before applying the next to prevent the muddying of colors and to generate new colors through overlap and optical mixing. In this manner he defined the wall below the chair rail with dense patches. Above, a few transparent patches anchor the white reserved paper that defines the plane of the wall. Leaving this broad expanse white, Cezanne adeptly emphasized the richness of the carpet and thereby the psychological intensity of his still life.37

Cezanne rendered the skulls efficiently. The visible graphite drawing defines their curvatures as well as their interior and exterior contours (fig. 13.21). Dark indigo strokes further demarcate the interior cavities of the eyes and nose. Overlapping touches of transparent colored washes read as shadows conveying volume. Cezanne employed short cobalt blue strokes and short red strokes to outline the skulls and define their volume in relation to the textile beneath and the wall behind. 38

For the richly patterned carpet, Cezanne adjusted the dilution of his washes, layered colors, and juxtaposed opaque and transparent pigments of the same color to generate optical brilliance. He applied opaque, orange-red vermillion, then brushed thin outlines of vivid, transparent red lake on top to create the red flower design (fig. 13.22). With no transparent green in his palette, he manipulated the dilution of his emerald green washes (another inherently opaque pigment) to create a range of hues, from pale to vivid, for rendering the foliage patterns. Similarly, he controlled the dilution of yellow ochre to vary the intensity of the color across the design. Occasional touches of dark, transparent indigo punctuate the darkest passages and serve as a visual counterpoint to the more widely used bright cobalt blue. Despite being one of the most opaque blue watercolors available, this Cezanne mixed with lead white, which further increased its opacity and lent brightness and thickness, or body, to the blue washes. Cezanne applied this opaque blue on top of other colors throughout the textile, delineating design elements in short, broken strokes without precise adherence to contours. Used throughout, the cobalt blue lines visually unite the carpet and the skulls.
39

A related oil painting, Three Skulls on a Patterned Rug from 1904 (see fig. 13.1), invites comparison. The paper and canvas supports are very close in size, with the canvas being 6.5 cm greater in height and 1 cm greater in width. Both were painted from an almost identical vantage point (slightly to the left in the oil) at or around the same moment. It is not known which was painted first, but one could interpret the thick passages of reworked oil paint (as seen in figs. 13.17 and 13.19) to indicate that Cezanne painted the oil version first, finessing the placement and contours with multiple adjustments evidenced in the dense paint layers. (For a discussion of the alternate sequence of execution, see the curatorial essay). Once he completed the oil, he painted The Three Skulls directly, without shifts to the watercolor passages. (The repeating pencil contours seen in the infrared image are typical of his working methods and not necessarily indicative of design indecision.) With no standard-size paper equivalent to his canvas size, he selected the closest fit, cropping the lower edge from the oil composition. 40

Portraying the same composition in oil and watercolor, a practice he employed throughout his career, allowed Cezanne to explore the different expressive outcomes possible with each medium. In keeping with the vanitas tradition, the oil version summons dark associations with mortality and death, with the skulls rendered in deep beige, the hue of aged bone, and thick dark paint covering the canvas surface. In the watercolor, Cezanne used a high-key palette, painted the skulls with a few transparent washes, and left significant portions of the white paper unpainted, yielding a light and brilliant composition. Psychologically, the watercolor turns the vanitas tradition on its head, offering a new reflection on the beauty and transience of life.  41

An ultraviolet-induced luminescence image (see fig. 13.24) suggests some portions of the sheet that now appear unpainted may initially have been covered with a pale wash, now faded. Under UV illumination it is possible to see pale brushstrokes in the uppermost skull, the skull at lower left, and the lower left of the textile pattern, including a round form at the lower left corner. The pale strokes are readily seen when comparing a detail of the leftmost skull in color and under UV illumination (fig. 13.23). In the oil painting, Cezanne painted the corresponding forms using a yellow ochre hue, which suggests these areas on the watercolor may have originally been painted with a yellow or brown wash. No residual color was observed with a stereomicroscope, and no pigments were detected through scientific analyses.^[83] Cezanne likely used a light-sensitive, organic pigment in a very dilute wash, making it both susceptible to fading and difficult to detect. This suggests that through the use of analogous yellow-brown washes, although pale, the watercolor may have, in certain respects, originally appeared closer to the oil cognate than initially understood. This also indicates that Cezanne used fewer paper reserves here than previously thought, concentrating them along the perimeter. 42

Signature

The work is unsigned.43

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Media and Support

Media

Cezanne drew with a medium-hard, medium-black graphite pencil similar to today’s standard No. 2 pencils.^[84] He used a minimum of seven watercolor pigments: cobalt blue, indigo, emerald green, yellow ochre, vermillion, and a red lake of animal origin (cochineal or kermes). Lead white is also present but confined to mixtures with cobalt blue.^[85] (Cobalt blue, with no traces of lead white, has been identified in many Cezanne watercolors, suggesting that the artist adulterated the cobalt blue pigment in this work by mixing it with lead white to obtain particular visual properties.) Evidence seems to indicate he might have used an organic yellow or brown pigment, now lost through fading. Cezanne mixed purple on the palette from cobalt blue and a red lake.^[86] Cezanne achieved opaque effects not by using commercially prepared gouache paints, which incorporate fillers and opacifiers, but by applying pigments with inherent opacity, such as vermillion and emerald green, with little dilution and by custom mixing a small amount of lead white with cobalt blue for opacity and brightness. Layering also increased the opaque appearance. Several of these pigments correlate with those identified in four watercolor palettes owned by the artist.^[87]
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Support

Cezanne selected a full sheet of slightly textured, moderately thick ivory wove paper with the impressed watermark “MONTGOLFIER SAINT MARCEL LES ANNONAY” (fig. 13.25).^[88] The paper appears bright and white on recto and verso and is made from uniform, high-quality fibers with very few inclusions visible at magnification. XRF analysis shows trace amounts of lead present in the sheet.^[89] Raking light shows a very fine screen pattern on the recto. Located at the center of the lower edge, the watermark is legible from the verso and measures 6 × 300 mm. The watermark repeats.45

The same watermark appears in Pistachio Tree at Chateau Noir (see cat. 12) and Man Wearing a Straw Hat (see cat. 14). The mark has been observed in a total of fifty-one Cezanne sheets dating from 1890 onward, underscoring Cezanne’s preference for this fine, machine-made paper.^[90] For practical and economic reasons, Cezanne purchased his paper à la main, that is, in quires of twenty-five sheets, and cut them down to size as needed.^[91] For this monumental watercolor Cezanne used a full sheet of the standard size Raisin (48 × 63 cm).^[92]46

Compositional Development

Cezanne first drew the composition in graphite pencil, repeating lines as he searched for the final placement of forms. He did not erase his pencil to make changes; he let all marks remain visible and function as an integral component of the final work.^[93] Cezanne layered transparent and opaque watercolor washes over the graphite, guided but not restrained by his pencil drawing. 47

Conservation History

There is no record of conservation treatment since entering the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. At some point a tan paper backing was removed. Otherwise, there is no evidence of conservation treatment.48

Condition Summary

Comparison with other watercolors suggests that the transparent washes in the background have faded to some degree. These may originally have been more vibrant and intense. The pale watercolor washes in the skulls and elsewhere have also faded (see Technical Summary above). Some fine cracks are evident in the densest green and blue applications. There are remnants of a tan paper backing on the verso (fig. 13.26).

Kristi Dahm
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Labels and Inscriptions

Inscriptions and Distinguishing Marks

Verso

Top edge, in graphite, framers’ marks: 63 x 48 (fig. 13.27)82

Upper left corner, in graphite: 1 (fig. 13.28)
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Lower right, in graphite: 79 x 63 (fig. 13.29)
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