Description
Bowl and Milk-Jug – a piece of a larger canvas
Two objects and nothing else: at the left a tall blue-grey milk pot with a lid, at the right a white bowl with an orange rim and green leaf sprigs, both on a warm ochre wooden surface, with a dark green plane behind. The canvas is tiny, measuring 20 × 18 cm, and is held by the Artizon Museum (Ishibashi Foundation) in Tokyo. The dating is not agreed: the catalogue raisonné gives about 1879, possibly earlier, while the museum itself proposes roughly 1873-1877. With us the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas, stretched over a solid stretcher frame.
The catalogue records it as a fragment
Among the technical data the catalogue raisonné adds a single word: fragment. This is not a small work but a piece cut out of a larger one. That is exactly why the format is so unusual – nearly square, a shade taller than it is wide – and exactly why the bowl at the right is not whole but cut off by the edge. What stood on the rest of the canvas the entry does not say, and we are not going to guess it.
Two sides lined up with the edge
In its own description the museum points out something that is hard to unsee once you know it: the left side of the milk pot and the right side of the bowl are painted parallel to the left and right edges of the work. Cézanne, in other words, adjusted the shape of the objects a little so that the arrangement would stand more firmly. The round bowl therefore has one side that is not round – and the scene does not slide, although nothing in it is holding it.
From Vollard’s shop to Tokyo
The canvas passed through the hands of the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, then the collectors Georges Murat and Eugène Blot, later the Florentine Egisto Fabbri, who lent it to the Venice Biennale in 1920. In the end the Japanese industrialist Shojiro Ishibashi bought it, and the work ended up in the Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo. That institution was renamed the Artizon Museum in 2020 – which is why older books give a different museum for the same work.
Because there are only two objects on the canvas, the work carries even very large sizes without ever looking crowded; on the contrary, the larger it gets, the more clearly you see how thickly the paint is laid on. The ochre and the dark green give it a quiet, almost wooden tone, suited to a hallway, a kitchen or a corner by the window. The fifteen sizes run from 41 × 45 cm to 163 × 180 cm, and in-between measurements we stretch to custom size. How it will look framed is shown by our 3D preview application. Among our art paintings on canvas it goes well with Still Life with Milk Jug and Fruit, Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears and The Buffet.
- Subject: Bowl and Milk-Jug, Paul Cézanne, Artizon Museum, Tokyo
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the catalogue raisonné records the canvas as a fragment, a piece cut from a larger work
