Description
Flowers in a Ginger Jar and Fruit – the exhibition title that says where the canvas had been
Out of a blue-and-white vessel seated in a woven cane basket rises a dense bouquet: white daisies, two deep red blooms, pale pink petals and small orange buds among dark green leaves. A white cloth is thrown across the table and falls in heavy folds, and pears lie on it, yellow and green. A wooden chair stands at the right edge. The canvas measures 65 × 81 cm, was made about 1890 and is held by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Here the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
A title that says more than a date
Among the exhibitions the catalogue raisonné records this one: from 2 November 1958 to 12 April 1959 the canvas hung in the Berlin Nationalgalerie as number 132. The show was called “Treasures of World Culture Saved by the Soviet Union”. Where the work spent the war years, who moved it and when exactly it returned, the catalogue does not say – it records only the exhibition and its title. That much we know for certain, and that much is all we claim here; the rest would be guesswork.
Two private men bought it for the museum
In the list of owners the last two stops carry the same date, 2 April 1904: the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer, and then the Berlin Nationalgalerie. The museum therefore acquired the Cézanne in 1904, two years before the painter died, while he was still alive. The money, however, did not come from the museum’s own purse. Beside the institution’s name the catalogue states expressly that the work was a gift of Eduard Arnhold and Robert von Mendelssohn, two Berlin collectors.
The jar, the cloth and the pears
The flower vessel is a ginger jar – the same kind of stoneware the painter also sets up in Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears, though here it is bedded into a basket of woven cane whose ochre lattice crosses over the lower half. The cloth is not decoration: its folds carry the pears and at the same time separate the flowers from the bare table, which reappears below and to the right. In 1965 the canvas travelled to Budapest for an exhibition of French painting, to the Szépművészeti Múzeum – the house that owns The Buffet.
In colour the work rests on two poles: the almost black green of the ground and the white of the cloth, and between them burn the red and orange blooms and the yellow of the pears. It is this contrast that keeps it legible from a distance, which is why it works well above a dining table, in a hallway or in a waiting room. The fifteen sizes run from 50 × 40 cm to 180 × 145 cm; intermediate measurements we stretch to custom size on the stretcher frame, and how it will look framed is shown by our 3D rendering application. If you want a quieter companion to this bouquet, among our art paintings on canvas it is the Straw-Trimmed Vase, Sugar Bowl and Apples.
- Subject: Flowers in a Ginger Jar and Fruit, Paul Cézanne, about 1890, Nationalgalerie, Berlin
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: in 1958 it hung in an exhibition titled “Treasures of World Culture Saved by the Soviet Union”
