Description
Still Life with a Curtain – the summit of Cézanne’s still lifes
Still Life with a Curtain is held to be one of the most accomplished of Cézanne’s still lifes: a heavy patterned curtain on the left, a white cloth in sharp folds, a jug with a pink pattern and two dishes of fruit. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this rich subject into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A cloth that behaves like a mountain range
Cézanne painted the white cloth not as fabric but as a landscape – the folds are sharp, broken and solid, so that the textile reads as rock. The comparison is not our invention: it is a constant in the literature, because the same construction from planes appears in his views of Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Objects from the same studio
The jug with the plant pattern, the blue-and-white vessel and the patterned curtain recur across several of Cézanne’s still lifes. The painter assembled his subjects from a limited stock of objects he kept in the studio and arranged them anew each time – the still life was his laboratory, not a decoration.
What you see on the canvas
The table tilts towards the viewer, the rims of the vessels are seen slightly from above, while the curtain falls straight down – three different viewpoints on one canvas. The original is painted in oil on canvas and was made in the mid-1890s; it is held by the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.
How Cézanne’s canvases reached Russia
That Still Life with a Curtain hangs in Saint Petersburg today is the doing of two Moscow textile merchants. Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov bought French modern painting at the turn of the century on a scale unmatched in Europe, and brought a run of Cézanne’s canvases to Moscow. At the end of 1918 the new Soviet state nationalised both collections. They were merged into the State Museum of New Western Art, which opened in 1928 in Morozov’s Moscow palace – the first museum in the world devoted exclusively to modern art.
A still life that carries space
The folds of the white cloth are the hardest part of this subject, and that is exactly why a painter makes it and not a printer. Ten sizes, and your own measurements on request. The warm reds and creams do best in a dining room or a kitchen with wooden furniture. Check how it will look framed in the 3D preview. Among our hand-painted oil reproductions you will find Cézanne’s other still lifes: Cherries and Peaches, Still Life with an Open Drawer and Still Life with Plaster Cast.
- Subject: Still Life with a Curtain, Paul Cézanne, mid-1890s, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: Cézanne built the folds of the white cloth by the same method he used for the rocky slopes of his landscapes
