Description
Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears – one red line across the white
A grey-green ginger pot bound about with plaited straw, a pomegranate with its stalk, green and reddish pears and a shallow white dish – all on a wooden table from which a white cloth falls. The canvas measures 46.4 × 55.6 cm, was made between 1890 and 1893 and is held by The Phillips Collection in Washington (acc. 0284, gift of Gifford Phillips in memory of his father, James Laughlin Phillips). 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 red stripe that cuts the cloth
Across the white cloth, running diagonally down, is a single red stripe. It is neither ornament nor accident: the catalogue records it as a property of the object in its own right – white cloth with a red stripe. That line picks up the red of the pomegranate and pulls it into the lower part of the work, where there would otherwise be nothing warm at all. Take it away and the scene falls apart into a cold top and an empty bottom.
The books he did not put away
At the upper left, on the edge of a shelf, lies a stack of books. The catalogue lists them separately, as a book. Cézanne did not, then, dress the table like a stage: what is painted is not an arrangement but the corner of a working room, with books left where they lay and a curtain hanging as it happens to hang.
A pot wrapped in straw
The ginger pot is not a smooth vessel. Plaited straw holds it round the belly, its pale strands crossing over the grey-green glaze; one of the titles the catalogue records reads exactly vase paillé, a straw-wrapped vessel. Behind it, along the upper right edge, hangs a curtain with an olive and brown leaf pattern, folded into a large triangle.
The work is reserved and quiet – grey, olive, brown – until the pomegranate and that red stripe open it. That is precisely why it does well in a room with quiet walls: a bedroom, a study or a library. Among the recorded owners, from December 1898, is Claude Monet, and after him his son Michel; we write about his collecting at greater length on Still Life with Milk Jug and Fruit. The fifteen sizes run from 50 × 42 cm to 180 × 150 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 The Kitchen Table, which has a ginger pot of the same kind, and Fruit and a Jug on a Table.
- Subject: Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears, Paul Cézanne, 1890-1893, The Phillips Collection, Washington (0284)
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the catalogue lists a book among the objects, and the white cloth with its red stripe
